The Life God only knows
by Chibijanai
Summary: When the guys from Hell mess up big time, how will our Capturing God cope with his further decreased gaming time? Unfortunately, reality still won't give him a break as he's busy doing everything else. from chap 80 contains spoilers. *Discontinued*
1. Prologue: A problem in Hell

**Boring Disclaimer business: I don't own TWGOK, all the stuff **_**except**__** my original ideas**_** are owned by Wakaki Tamiki. It goes for all chapters I will write.**

AN: This story contains the light novel characters (which I'm not familiar with, never read them) so if there are some mistakes please bear with it. ENJOY!

* * *

><p>A demon from Hell looked down at the chaos she'd created and smiled wickedly.<p>

"Soon, this age will come to end." she muttered as she enjoyed the view of administrators frantically trying to regain control of the mess.

A group of demons came up behind her and bowed respectfully.

"The operation was successful, the Far East office has been sabotaged but..." the young demon hesitated.

"But what?" she frowned in annoyance.

"Umm... 4 of our demons have been captured." the demon looked up hoping that her leader wasn't in a bad mood.

"Those incompetent fools... they should just kill themselves." she tapped her foot with annoyance, "Right, we're returning to base!"

The leader stormed past as the young demon sighed with relief. The group turned and went leaving fire, rubble and confusion behind them.

...

Katsuragi Keima of class 2-B sat down on his chair and continued to play on his PFP without looking up. Although he appeared to be completely and utterly absorbed in his galge, his ability to play with multiple games at once (24 in God mode) meant that he could easily be thinking of other things. Such a 'godly' way of playing had earned him the title of 'Capturing God' on the net. His speciality was galges but he excelled at whatever would be considered as games (even board games). At the moment though, he was thinking of the words that Diana (a goddess) had said the night before when she'd snuck in through his bedroom window. He sighed.

_15 spirits captured still about 60,000 to go and now I've got goddesses on my back. What have I done to deserve such a screwed up fate? Why won't reality leave me alone? _

Having thought that, the situation that he'd wound up in wasn't what a lot of people would call realistic. He was interrupted by loud call from behind,

"Kami-nii-sama, why didn't you wait for me to clean up? You're very mean for leaving me alone!" his demon 'sister' complained.

_And_ _why have I got a demon partner who offers more trouble than help?_

"Elsie, it was your fault for dropping all the plates, now leave me alone." he replied gruffly still figuring out routes and flags for his game.

Elsie sighed and walked away to where her friends Ayumi, Chihiro and Miyako welcomed her.

"Is your brother being mean to you again?"

Keima frowned and turned his full attention on the game until homeroom, ignoring the feeling that somehow he'd attracted some unwanted attention.


	2. Chapter 1: A transmission from Hell

The second lesson of the day was English with Kodama-sensei and wasn't something that Keima had to pay a lot of attention to except to figure out whether any of the content might be in the upcoming tests; which he was easily going to ace through the power of deduction. So as usual, he had his eyes stuck to the PFP screen when suddenly, a familiar noise resounded through the air interrupting the teacher whose face was fast turning into darkening shades of red.

_Dorodoron Dorodoron ~_

"Who ketai telefone is it? Kodama shouted and immediately pinpointed Elsie who was writhing uncomfortably in her seat trying to cover up the spirit sensor clipped onto her head.

Keima turned reluctantly to see who might be the owner of the potential runaway spirit when he realised that the sensor was blinking green.

_An incoming message from Hell, that's rare. The only time I've been around to hear a transmission was when Haqua let a loose soul escape. Maybe I should help Elsie out..._

"You!" Kodama shouted at Elsie "Why you have ketai telefone, huh?"

"Hey." Keima cut in coolly and Kodama turned to him as Keima signalled for Elsie to go outside, "You've got it wrong. It's supposed to be 'Why do you have a mobile phone?'

While it was accented, it wasn't as bad as what was coming from Kodam's mouth and the grammar was certainly something that didn't need to be corrected.

"What do you say?" Kodama growled in his 'Engrish', determined not to be bested by the infamous otamegane.

"Well, I was just thinking why you're an English teacher when you're so bad at it." He answered with his eyes still on the little screen in front of him.

In some ways, Keima was slightly sad that there wasn't a scene that was worth him drooling over but then he was at the credits anyway having completed the last of the routes. It would have made Kodama even angrier which was pretty fun to watch.

"You're getting detention." Kodama-sensei snapped.

"For correcting you? That's a strange reason to give me detention." Keima smirked.

"For backchatting me, you... you."

"I don't find my attitude particularly wrong though. Don't you think that the students deserve to learn something correct, even if it's a little bit." Keima said while nonchalantly changing disks.

"That. That's what I'm giving you a detention for." by this time, they'd already given up on the 'English'.

Keima decided it was probably enough for now. Besides, his main objective was just to cover Elsie and he had the whole class' eyes on him and he didn't quite want more trouble.

"Fine." and that was the end of it.

When Elsie finally came back in some minutes later Keima glanced over to find that she looked worried. What could the message be, having enough power to wipe off that ridiculous look of naivety from her face? ...Not that it was anything particularly bad.

"You're getting detention as well!" Kodama shouted loudly across the room.

"Ehhh~" as she quickly returned to her seat with her normally innocent face back on.

…

_It seems that even Katsuragi can be protective of Elsie-chan as well. The way he always seems so harsh to Elsie...maybe he's too embarrassed to admit that he loves her as a sister a lot._  
>Ayumi looked across to her side where Keima was (no other way of saying this) lecturing the school's most easily riled up teacher and could not help but admire him.<em><br>He's pretty cool._  
>She blushed as realised what she'd been thinking.<em><br>There's no way that..._

…

When lunch break finally came. Keima gave Elsie a meaningful look and walked out of the classroom. Elsie declined lunch with her friends and ran out to meet with him. She found him on the rooftop.

"Kami-nii-sama, there's terrible news from Hell!" Elsie exclaimed, falling face down on the ground in her haste to explain the situation to her 'brother'.

"So, what happened?" he asked as Elsie picked herself up from the ground.

"Dokuro Skull said that the Far East office in New Hell has been sabotaged, lots of personnel injured and many machines aren't working." Elsie exclaimed in an almost inaudible torrent.

I paused as I let these line of words with this piece of information and its implications sink in.

"What does that mean?" he asked hoarsely.

"I'm sure you can deal with it." she said enthusiastically.

"Just tell me!" he shouted.

She recoiled but she was used to this treatment from Keima. Even so, she did (as usual) start rather shakily, "You see, although no spirits have escaped thanks to recovering quickly, a lot of the altered memories have been destabilized and there are reports from demons working in Asia that some released hosts have tried to contact the buddies. Rumours have been spreading from other people who have altered memories as well... nii-san?"

During her short, unfinished report, all the muscles that Keima had (including the ones he didn't use) tensed up.

_Why won't reality let me have it easy?_

After brooding for a few minutes in silence, he was surprised by the sound of the rooftop door being opened and in the moment his muscles didn't know what to do... "ARGH! CRAMP!"

...

"Seriously, you really scared those freshmen out there you know! I had to apologise to them." chided Elsie as they walked along the corridor.

Keima wasn't listening, he was scanning the corridor for any sign of the girls he'd captured and amongst a few pointed fingers in his direction, he could've sworn that he saw hair that looked like a bird's nest, but then it had disappeared before he could pinpoint it. They approached the classroom and Keima drew up short of the closed door.

"What's the matter?" Elsie asked meekly.

"Make a doll of me." Keima commanded.

"What?"

"Just do it, I need to go home and think about this for a bit."

"But don't you want to see who has or hasn't got their memories back?" she asked already creating a rough design of him which would be covered with an illusion.

"I'm putting you in charge of that for today and don't forget the basics, because Hell won't be pleased to deal with rumours of any flying girl with everything that's been going on. Got that?"

"Yes."

"Take my bag when you go home, okay." and he left with Elsie covering him using invisibility.

_Now that's not going to go wrong like with Jun Nagase's capture._


	3. Chapter 2: A visit from a demon

"What are you doing?" said a light voice behind him as he was at the gates leaving the school.

_Oh man._

He turned to see a 15 year old girl with frizzy hair standing with a bemused expression on her face.

_Why didn't Elsie keep the spell up for longer, that idiot._

"Minami... chan?" he uttered while going through as many routes in his head as he could, then deleting the options for captures and negative comments.

"You still remember me?"

"Yeah, sort of..."

_Why is the one with the least events showing up first?_

An awkward silence followed while he contemplated on the choices to keep their relationship as stable as possible.

"Are you skipping school?" she asked.

"What else does it look like?" he replied casually yet firmly having finally chosen his escape route.

"Oh... right." she couldn't find any way of replying.

"You'll be late for class if you dawdle any longer."

"Huh? Oh! You're right." and ran off; glad there was an excuse to be away from Keima's overwhelming presence.

_I guess it shouldn't have affected my image of being a senpai too much, but it seems I'm relying on her imagination yet again._

…

A small girl happened to see this small exchange on the roof but had no idea as to what it could mean.  
>"Luna, why do I suddenly feel...<em>imperfect<em>? Why do I feel concerned about him? I've only seen him once." she asked.  
><em>Wait? Isn't he...?<br>I'm not letting you go to the moon!  
><em>"I know that already, you don't have to tell me again." she whispered, knowing it was important but not entirely knowing what it was.

...

He was a little surprised to see an uninvited guest to have been waiting at this hour but immediately knew what she was going to discuss about.

"Hey, Haqua."

"Hmm. Back already? Your mum said you were only going to be back in another few hours. So I was enjoying the snacks she'd made me before she went out to do the shopping." said Haqua, the genius demon.

Although she was almost the complete opposite of Elsie, he wouldn't choose Haqua as his partner purely because his freedom for gaming would've been greatly restricted.

"You know what I'm here for, right?" she said.

"Yeah, even Elsie is not stupid to ignore a message like that."

They grimaced as they brooded over the situation which had so suddenly come on them. Haqua was the first to break the silence.

"Yukie is fine at the moment because her method of capture doesn't dig too deep but I'm thinking that you might be having trouble since you use love to capture the souls."

"I didn't think that you'd care much about me." Keima said as he got a carton of juice out.

"Sh-shut up!" her cheeks colouring slightly although as usual, it was replaced by annoyance.

Keima sighed, "I've got Elsie to monitor the situation but I've already found that one of the girls have probably remembered and from the attention I've got from background characters, I'm guessing they remember some of the rumours from the methods of previous captures, It'll be impossible to stop them spreading to the girls." having said this, he suddenly realized the enormity of the task ahead of him as he sat opposite Haqua.

"Oh. As for things like rumours from outside parties, you won't have to worry about them after tomorrow because other branch offices have pooled in to help the recovery with spare machinery and personnel, and they're working hard to reintroduce the necessary collective illusions and one only takes a few seconds." Haqua replied.

"So wait, you place illusions back in time which alter their memories." he reasoned.

"Seriously, you pick up on details way too quickly." Haqua grumbled, "Some machines maintains the substance of the illusion but it rarely needs to use much power because the illusions are inconspicuous and people rarely dwell back on those unimportant events. Now though, only few are left and working overtime. If you meet with one of your targets, you're _likely_ to trigger the memories unless they already remember."

_I guess this has got to be considered a salvation in the midst of a tragic incident._

"Why did it happen anyway? I don't think that Hell could ever be as careless as Elsie." he commented wryly.

Haqua let herself smile a little but it was replaced with a cold expression as she contemplated on how to tell him, in the end she settled for a direct answer.

"It was Vintage; they're a group of new demons who believe that the old hell should be resurrected. We'd managed to capture a few and they had the badge on them." Haqua then looked at him to find that he was already scribbling on a handy piece of paper. "Weren't you listening to me?" she snapped.

"Yes I was, but I've already attained enough information for now to decide on my next course of action." he declared. "You'd better return, I need some time to think on my own."

"But..." Haqua's words died on her lips as Keima gave her the look of Otoshigami, the Capturing God. "Fine Katsuragi, just make sure you don't screw up!" and left.

After he'd finished scribbling on the paper, the he knew the general course of action to take against the girls if they had their memories. He ripped it up and threw it in the bin.

_I'm not having Elsie laugh at my drawings anymore. _

He headed upstairs to reduce the backlog of games he had stored in his game library, certain that it was going to be a long time before he would see his games again if he didn't take this chance to play.

_This has hardly made the goddess search any easier and I really hope that there won't be anymore runaway spirits. Logically though, if there are any goddesses in the people I've conquered, if they remember now, they should stay the same after everything is back under control... but that's a pretty harsh way of trying to find out the goddesses, isn't it?_

Then he switched to God mode.

…

Fuse Aoba raised her head from the screen of the galge she was playing on with her PFP and tried to catch hold of a thought that was slipping away.  
><em>Don't pursue it, just relax.<br>_After a few minutes of contemplation she'd arrived at a decision.  
><em>The disciple cannot become more important to the master before she has beaten the master.<br>_She grabbed her PFP and quickly started typing a short message and without a moment of doubt, clicked 'send'.


	4. Chapter 3: A challenge from the genius

As expected, Elsie hadn't been able to find any useful information, had complained all of yesterday about the fact that only she had gotten detention in the end and Keima was really stressed out because he'd decided that it would be a good idea to play right through to the morning.

"Finally," he croaked, "I've caught up with my games." and collapsed in the typical fashion like he'd do after half a lap around his school circuit during PE.

"Kami-nii-sama you're overworking yourself again!" Elsie said with concern, "You've got a lot to do today since Hell will be relying on us to keep the situation under control."

"Shut up, my ideal heroines must be rescued and what better chance have I got than yesterday; the last day of my freedom." he argued.

Elsie sighed, "Make sure you eat all of your breakfast. I worked very hard to make it you know."

For a moment, the famous Capturing God froze and in the next instant, decided that there could only be one choice to take if he didn't want to die...

"Mum, I'm going to school now, take care~" he said jovially then rushed away from Café Grandpa knowing his life was on the line if he didn't get away fast.

...

Katsuragi Keima got to the classroom without incident and pulled out his PFP. It also seemed that Hell had kept to its recovery schedule and bystanders simply ignored him as usual.

_I guess I should check my emails for now since none of the targets have arrived yet... 438 messages._

After a few minutes, Keima had already aided 6 'lost lambs' and uploaded a walkthrough for one of the games that he played yesterday onto his site despite the unstable signal. Though not too soon after he was looking at the screen, seemingly in bewilderment.

_What's with this, is this some kind of joke?_

* * *

><p>Dear Otoshigami,<p>

I would like to challenge you to the ultimate galge. Be ready for it.

Mai-hime

* * *

><p><em>Mai-hime...I guess I'd expected her to remember but, I'd really rather not have to deal with her...<em>

At that moment he was interrupted by a firm pat on the back.

"Hey, what's got into you? You look like you've seen a ghost!" a cheerful voice said.

Keima looked up to find Ayumi standing right there. He quickly tried to regain his composure.

"Go away, it's none of your business!" he snapped rudely, protecting his PFP from her prying eyes.

The casual expression was replaced by a murderous frown in an instant and she punched his face flat onto his desk. "I regret talking to you, go to Hell, Otamegane!" and walked away with her cheeks brightly flushed.

_I'd say that she totally hates me, I don't think she remembers about the conquest..._

Although the email had been a bit of a shock, he decided that the best course of action would be to accept the challenge since he'd already decided the course of action in which to tackle Aoba. If it was her, it seemed that the best choice was to start a new game although admittedly, it would be slightly different because her game _hadn't _been reset and she didn't know him well enough to be the character who 'mysteriously knows everything about the main character'. Still, the Capturing God knows all the routes and as he was replying to the message the signal cut out again.

_Most people would expect this school to have a pretty good signal... oh well, it's not like I needed to collect any events which need internet connection. The reply will have to wait._

Elsie came over and asked sternly "What did you say to Ayumi? She seems really angry."

"I just said what was necessary for the situation." he replied gruffly, loading a game which he treasured above all; a heroine he considered a soulmate resided in it- Sugimoto Yotsuba or as Keima liked to call her; 'Yokkyun'. It was his mental salvation.

"But you didn't have to make her that angry! What if- what if... that was the trigger for her memories to return?" Elsie exclaimed desperately.

"If you've remembered correctly, that kiss between us can still be considered an accident because we tripped on the stairs." he thought for a moment, "But it's an undeniable fact that I have captured the girls and meeting them at all if they remember everything will result in the 'Love points' rising even if I don't do anything afterwards. If they find out about each other in whatever way, the situation could... no _will_ escalate out of my control. While I can deal with love triangles, any more and I will become their sacrifice and this..." he quickly called up the message he received from Fuse and showed it to Elsie, "is the girl I will have to worry about most."

"Heh~, Fuse-san sent you a challenge." Elsie said while trying to look like she'd understood everything.

This ultimately failed and she gave up trying to keep up with the pace which he (as a stuck up genius) constantly tended to go at. She also knew that she infinitely respected this amazing person she considered her 'Kami-sama'; in the end she was always stuck at what to do with Keima. Even so, she did feel responsible for him because however their first meeting went, she had and will always consider him as her 'onii-sama' whatever the circumstance.

She sighed dejectedly, "I'm going now."

As was usual with Elsie though, she recovered quickly and was soon immersed in conversation with Ayumi. Moments later, Chihiro arrived with Miyako and joined in with Elsie and Ayumi.

"Aww man, there's only two months left until the dance festival and we still don't have a drummer." Chihiro stated worriedly, "We'll need to find one fast if we want to do something for the festival."

Keima sighed, and returned to his games though not before he noticed a quick glance from Chihiro.

_That's the vaguest hint I've had in ages. _Keima thought with annoyance.

Break time soon came and he decided to try and finish updating his website. While he did this a thought occurred to him; "Elsie, could you ask Haqua how long Hell will need at least before everything returns to normal?"

"What? Didn't I tell you yesterday while you were on your games that..."

In the short moment while Elsie had been speaking, it seemed that for the Capturing God, a flag had been raised as Fuse Aoba (playing on her PFP) came out of nowhere and bumped into him. Keima was set on ignoring her and walked past her as he continued to press buttons on his PFP. Aoba grabbed his arm and twirled him to face her. They both ended up staring as each other with the same expression of annoyance.

"Say sorry at least!", "What do you want?" they snapped to each other at the same time.

This broke down into a staring competition which didn't last long.

Keima was the one to speak first; "Sorry." he growled unapologetically, "Is that enough?" and strolled away betting on the right response from her.

"Why do you keep ignoring me?"she asked with a steely glint from her eye. "Do you really think so lowly of the time we spent together?"

Keima half turned to the determined girl, "What do you mean? I haven't even met you before, don't be stupid." and that signalled the end of meeting.

Elsie was left wondering what to do and while she was pondering about the situation, Keima had pulled some distance between them.

"Nii-sama!" the idiot demon called much too loudly, "Wait for me!"

_That stupid demon, is there a limit to how dense she can be?_


	5. Chapter 4: An imperfect flag

"How did that go? Was it alright?" Elsie asked eagerly and impatiently at the same time.

"Hmm."

"Hey, tell me, tell me!" she insisted.

"Yeah, yeah, I'll tell you when we get to the rooftop. I need to think." Keima replied irritably, dwelling on 'first meeting' he'd just had with Fuse Aoba.

_Although I got the right response from her, it feels like I'm not entirely in control. We both know that first impressions are important and it may seem that... no way._

He stopped for a moment as he realised that although everything had seemingly gone according to his plan, he'd underestimated the one that earned a reputation on the net as 'Mai-hime'. What he'd actually done was accept the invitation to play the 'ultimate game'.

_I shouldn't have responded to that last line at all. What's done is done, it goes to the same route I originally planned but I should've noticed the route to pull me out of that. _

Although he operated on logic and reason, it had to be said that these sorts of conversations were just outside his safety zone, like fighting the final boss with a male character who had little experience points. He was, after all more familiar with the workings of the routes for actually capturing girls than... stalling them.

He continued to walk to the rooftop with Elsie in tow. Elsie suddenly remembered something as they climb the stairs.

"Kami-nii-sama," she said, watching him play intensely, "about the question you asked earlier..."

Keima covered her mouth as they saw a familiar small shape sitting on the bench with a telescope in front of her. This didn't, however, stop Elsie from finishing her sentence.

"...they say that it'll take about a month for everything to get everything back to normal."

Even though her voice was muffled, to Keima, it was crystal clear in his mind and sounded like the sky was falling down.

"WHAT?" he roared, flinging his arms wildly, "WHY IS IT THAT RUMOURS TAKE ONE DAY AND EVERYTHING ELSE TAKES A FLIPPING MONTH?" he'd totally forgotten about the existence of the tiny girl behind him.

...

Kujyou Tsukiyo suddenly heard a loud shout from behind her and turned the telescope to look at what was happening. The first thing she noticed was that the source of the sound was from the man who she'd seen yesterday. The next thing that somehow caught her attention was the little console which he was flinging around in his hand, as he stilled she saw the little image on the screen. For some reason, it looked familiar to her, as if she'd been shown it many times. She finally noticed that the two people were staring at her.

"Wha-what do you want?" she asked as neutrally as possible, although the slight stutter surprised her; it was a sign of imperfection.

Although the man had been shouting angrily just seconds before, he now had a flawless poker face which would have been impossible to penetrate. Even his words were said flawlessly said; not neutral but without 'excess' emotion.

"May I ask about what you might be doing here?" he asked, his finger traced up in a perfect curve without unnecessary movements stopping to point at her telescope.

But then of course, what remained to be changed would be the imperfection of how the man himself looked...

...

Although when he'd initially started this 'perfection' game, he was full of confidence that it would be easy. All he needed to do was to appeal to her as a 'perfect' person and she would be stable and 'Love points' would accumulate to free a goddess if there was one. It turned out that movements like that were actually incredibly hard to execute perfectly and he was- by all means- struggling to hold onto his poker face which threatened to betray the fact that he was actually writhing in pain inside.

_Why oh why is it that Elsie is so useless when it comes to situations where I'd gladly have some intervention or magic to make things easier? Wait a minute, she's completely abandoned me..._

_Awah~ it seems that I need to leave and not interfere. _Elsie quietly made her way back to the door and upon opening it, bumped into Minami who had been concentrating intensely on the exchange between Keima and Tsukiyo. They ended up as a heap on the floor.

"Sorry!" Elsie exclaimed "Are you okay?"

"Yeah... aren't you Katsuragi-senpai's sister?" Minami asked.

"Yep and you must be Minami-chan!" Elsie said brightly, "Kami-nii-sama has told me all about you while you were following him."

_Why has senpai told her about me? This is so embarrassing! _Minami thought as her cheeks blushed bright red.

"Minami? Are you really okay? You look as if you're about to faint." Elsie exclaimed, "H-hey!"

Minami collapsed onto the floor and Elsie panicked.

She ran through the door and called; "Kami-nii-sama! Minami's just fainted inside!"

Tsukiyo and then Keima turned towards Elsie who was gesturing wildly to the door.

_What is that stupid demon doing? _Keima thought although trying not to show irritation. _Just why has she got to intervene with the most _ridiculous _methods?_

"Hmph. Luna, let's ignore them, they aren't worth my time." Tsukiyo frowned and turned back towards her telescope.

"Senpai, I'm alright. You really don't need to worry about me!" Minami called stumbling through the door.

Keima took one last look to make sure that Tsukiyo's back was really turned and ran for the door, hoping that the flag closure didn't completely break down into something totally unsuited for the situation.

_Dammit, I really hate manual labour._.. as he picked Minami up and threw her back inside. He slammed the door behind leaving Elsie out there.

"Your sister..." Minami pointed towards the closed door which left Elsie shut out.

"Are you alright?" Keima asked.

This made Minami wonder how many times she been asked the same question within five minutes.

"Yeah." she answered, "I'm fine."

"Thank goodness." he said as the bell rung for the next lesson. "Do you still need to go to the nurse's office then?"

"N-n-no! Thank you for your concern." she babbled as she raced down the stairs.

"And one more thing, can you stop following me around. It makes me feel like you're watching over me instead!" Keima called after her.

The quiet reply was; "I'll try."

_With that, I've dealt with them._

He suddenly realised that he'd done nothing about playing his games or updating his website.

_Nooo, my game time is already being deprived! This is absolutely the worst situation ever._

…

Throughout the lesson, Tsukiyo couldn't concentrate. Even though the first meeting felt like the most ridiculous and negative thing ever, she couldn't stop thinking of the man. It wasn't the ideal meeting but the contrast between the (not quite) ideal man and the situation seemed to make the man shine. An unfamiliar sensation of her chest tightening came and in that instant she remembered._  
>That wasn't our first meeting! He'd saved my life and helped me before that. But why was he acting so strange today?<em>  
>Luna seemed to stare questioningly up at her. The pain in her chest lessened as she held Luna closer to herself.<p> 


	6. Chapter 5: A false alarm?

By lunchtime, Keima was physically burnt out. He'd turned up late for PE and as a result, he was made to swim way more lengths than he could manage. Although his PFP wasn't actually that useful in diverting his attention away from physical exertion, it would've made no difference whatsoever because for some reason his plastic resealable packets either had holes or faulty seals. He could've sworn it was someone's doing but without evidence, he could not actually get anyone to fess up. So for the first time, (practically in his life) he had to go to a lesson without his PFP consoles.

"Here's your bento!" Elsie exclaimed, "Even though it's from this morning, it still fresh because the ingredients are kept alive until you eat it!"

_I don't want you to explain about something that disgusting! _Keima thought as he sidled away from the strange collection of writhing tentacles and eyes.

"Hey, don't go away." Elsie called after him as he abruptly made a break for it.

He wasn't going to escape though because the effort which he'd put into PE meant that he couldn't even reach the door before he slumped lifelessly to the floor.

Elsie's friends laughed, "He's such a clown!" Chihiro remarked with tears streaming down her eyes.

"Stop laughing, that's very mean you know." Elsie defended passionately for her Kami-nii-sama.

But they continued to laugh and Elsie's pouting only served to make them laugh even harder. In that space of time, Keima had found enough strength to pull him outside.

_Next location... somewhere Elsie won't pester me; the library._

...

Shiomiya Shiori sat down at her desk (post in the library). She wondered whether she should write more of her story or read more books to get better ideas._  
>The dance festival is just two months away and I haven't been able to write a lot.<em>  
>She swung her chair back and finally decided that she really should write more on the story but...<em><br>I've not been able to remember much about the encounter, I wonder if I really can get it done in time._  
>She opened the drawer rather too quickly and it ended up on the floor scattering the contents inside. As she frantically stuffed everything back in the drawer, she suddenly noticed a book which she never knew was there.<em><br>Let's see, 'Top 100 galges, chosen by you'... what is this about?_  
>She opened the book to the front page and saw a name: Katsuragi Keima 2-B (with a skull next to it).<em><br>I guess I should probably return it but how?_  
>She looked to the button for the announcer and immediately knew that wasn't an option, it was too embarrassing. So she packed everything (except the book) back into the drawer and decided to take it to his classroom.<p>

...

He stumbled along the corridor trying to get away as quickly as possible (which was barely above walking speed) and bumped into the back of a girl who was talking to a couple of other girls.

"Oof." as they collided.

"That's the guy you're looking for." said the girls and rushed away leaving her with Keima.

Keima looked up to see his forth capture target, Shiomiya Shiori.

She looked rather uncomfortable.

"Um... erm...," she started and out came a torrent of words "I came to return this to you please take it." and pushed a book into his hands.

She blushed, realising she'd spoken too quickly and forgotten to breathe.

"So-sorry, Keima-kun!" and she ran off.

...

Elsie was surprised to see Keima walk back into the classroom after the effort he'd put in to escape.

_Maybe he wants to try the bento!_

She shoved the lunch box to him and he dodged, taking the bento and setting it on the side, closed the lid and dragged Elsie outside.

"How do you explain this?" he asked and shoved the front page of the book he'd just got from Shiori into Elsie's face, pointing to where his name was written.

"Oh, I thought Kami-nii-sama wouldn't want it to get lost." she replied happily, "Isn't that great that you have it back now."

"To Hell with the book! I nearly had a heart attack when Shiori approached me outta nowhere." he rounded on Elsie who was already on the verge of tears, "Do your job properly for goodness sake, I'm the one who suffers when you mess up." he was breathing heavily by the end of his rant.

"I'm so sorry!" and ran back into the classroom tears flooding out. Keima wasn't all that worried, in a few seconds it would be like nothing had happened. It had always been the way with Elsie.

He looked at his PFP, _I wish there was a game where you can punch demon sandbags to rescue heroines because I'd certainly buy it. Who knows what that demon won't do when it really matters...  
><em>

Suddenly, he could smell something delicious yet sounded and looked like something from a horror movie.

"You will eat it right right?" Elsie asked innocently.

"NOOOO!" and Keima ran off, leaving Elsie with the only option of having to eat it herself instead.

_I'd put so much effort into making it as well._

_..._

Shiori felt something some strange yet familiar feeling around him and didn't understand why she was able say his name so _easily.  
>Maybe I should get him to help me with my story.<br>"He's the worst person in school, he's even got a nickname which says it all; 'Otamegane'"  
>Maybe I shouldn't...<em>

* * *

><p>One of the sentences weren't supposed to have spaces but it seems like that's not allowed...<em><br>_


	7. Chapter 6: What! A runaway spirit?

(NB: Most of the content in this chapter is the original concept of Wakaki Tamiki [The World God only knows: chapter 81] I don't own it but please bear with me. If you've read that chapter, you'll pretty much know what happens here.)

* * *

><p>All in all, it would be said that lunch passed rather uneventfully which suited Keima who further updated his website. Now though, it was the end of the school day and Elsie was fretting about the lack of a drummer in their band (2B Pencils).<p>

"Kami-nii-sama, there's only 2 months until the dance festival and we still can't find a drummer." Elsie sighed.

"You guys should give up, there's no way you'll be able to find a drummer in time and get her to learn the part." Keima commented, "It is however, probably salvageable if you could find a skilled drummer... impossible for you though."

Elsie drooped like a wilted flower but quickly lit up again as she thought of a good idea, "We should find someone from the wind instrument club! They're all music specialists so there must be at least one who is skilled with drums."

"Don't be stupid, you're not the only ones who are getting ready for the festival, do you think that the one you find will be able to get ready for performing two different things on the same day?" Keima reasoned.

But Elsie was already rushing away to wherever the wind instrument clubroom was. Keima sighed and wondered where Elsie got all her energy from when he heard a rhythmic tapping from behind him. He took a quick glance to the source of the sound, found it was nothing special and continued down the steps. It finished tapping and a worrying sound filled his ears. "Kyah!"

As he was about to turn, a heavy weight bore down on his back and he was sent tumbling down.

_NOOO! Must protect PFP!_ Unfortunately, it flew straight out from his fingers.

"I'm very sorry! I didn't know you were there and I really didn't expect to fall down..." the girl said.

Keima wasn't concerned about himself or the strange girl which had suddenly fallen on top of him, he scampered to his PFP and to his dismay, found that the impact had frozen his PFP.

"ARGH! MY PFP FROZE, I HAVEN'T EVEN SAVED YET!" Keima screamed.

The girl immediately pulled away as she heard running footsteps, "M-mother-".

She winced as her mother sent the guy (who really should've been thanked for cushioning her fall), ramming into the wall.

"Yui! Are you alright, has that guy hurt you anywhere? We need to call the police!" the hysteric woman exclaimed loudly.

"No, mother, _I_ accidentally bumped into _him_. Please calm down." Yui said softly.

Meanwhile, she was completely ignored as her mother continued to rant obscenities about the school and insult the 'scum' that attended it.

"EXCUSE ME!" Keima hollered, "My PFP and the heroine has fallen victim to you, give back her happiness!"

As much as Keima wanted it to become a shouting competition, he realised that it would do no good if the one he was trying to argue with didn't listen.

After she'd finished ranting, she let out a snort of derision and turned to leave. Another voice cut through.

"Yui, we heard that you were going to quit the club! Is that true?" a couple of girls asked.

As Yui was about to answer, she was cut off by her mother, Keima was busy salvaging his game but he did dedicate a fraction of attention to the exchange.

"I'm afraid that is the case, after all, my daughter has many things to train for and it would be easier on her if she quit. After all, she is a member of the Goidou family and Yui agrees. Right, Yui?"

The girls stood silently with pleading eyes.

"I'm sorry, I don't think I can play at the Dance festival..." Yui said with a downcast expression and turned to go after her mother.

At that moment, Elsie came bumbling down the stairs. "Kami-nii-sama! I found someone but it turns out she not going to be able to play..." she panted.

"Hmph, I expected as much. Let's go." Keima replied and started off.

"...the girl's a prodigy though, the only problem is that her annoying family won't let her play!" Elsie continued regardless.

_Why do I feel like I'm constantly being ignored? _Keima thought.

_Dorodoro~ Dorodoro~_

As the spirit sensor went off, Keima and Elsie knew who the target was immediately.

_Why now? What have I done to deserve this?_

"Sheesh, this school is so noisy." Yui's mother commented irritably, "I'm definitely going to have you change schools."

"It was quiet until you came along." Keima said coldly, he was annoyed to realise that it was now becoming second nature for him to act when the sensor went off.

_I've completely accepted this fate, haven't I?_ And he didn't hear what Yui's mother had to complain about him as he slipped deeply into thought.

...

_This man is so rude to mother. H-he must definitely be an unpleasant person._  
>But it contradicted to what her heart truly felt.<p> 


	8. Chapter 7: A 3D encounter

Yui's mother left the school in a huff and Yui herself bowed to Keima as an apology and hurried after her mother.

"Elsie, do I really have to capture the spirit?" he asked gruffly, "My hands are already full with the mess Hell has caused me.

"My superiors explicitly said that capturing spirits is still top priority." Elsie said "in fact, they said it was more important than it was before."

"What else haven't you told me yet?" he grumbled, looking up from his PFP and glaring at her.

Of course it was out of character for him to do so but then, he wasn't keen about replying to the message he now had in front of him without a concrete plan.

"It wasn't my fault! You were playing on your games when I told you and you grunted at me so I assumed that you'd heard." Elsie complained.

_So now it's my fault? _He thought irritably.

"Hey look, it's Shiori-chan!" Elsie suddenly exclaimed.

"What?" Keima looked up to find Shiori carrying a box of... audio CDs and staring at him.

_Why can't I even go home and have a break?_

"You gave me my book back, thank you." he said shortly and stood there like he didn't know what to do.

"..." Shiori looked down, her cheeks blushing. They stood in silence for about half a minute.

"Well, I guess I should go now." Keima replied and made to walk past her.

As he did, she tugged at his uniform.

"Umm... do you want to help me with my story...?"

_Does this mean she remembers? _he thought critically.

"...I-I'm s-s-s-sorry! What am I saying?" she clamped her mouth shut.

"Are you okay?" Keima said with a confused face, he approached her slightly.

Shiori blushed bright red and ran to the direction of the library.

"Hey! Good luck with your story!" Keima called after her.

Upon hearing that, she half turned to him and nodded in acknowledgement before she quickly walked away.

Keima turned back to his PFP, decided it was appropriate to send the message and therefore, clicked the 'reply' button. Not long after, he heard something chime from behind the trees. He turned in that direction.

"Hey, who's behind there?" he called towards the general direction of the chiming.

Fuse Aoba stepped out from behind the trees, "Che, isn't that just the lamest way of being found out."

"Aren't you that girl from this morning? Why are you following me?" he asked.

"Yes and why do you ask?" she retorted, the word 'displeasure' written all over her expression.

"I'm the one asking you a question." he said shortly, returning to his 2D world.

She proceeded to ignore him, "What of that girl?"

"What girl?"

"You know full well who I'm talking about."

"Why would I want to tell you? We just meet today and you're now being pushy about the most random things."

It turned out that she was already looking back to her PFP screen, she smiled.

"Otoshigami," she intoned, "do you not realise that you have already accepted my challenge?"

"What purpose do you have of meeting me in the real, the 3D world?" he asked upon hearing his famous title being used in the real world.

"I'm sorry to say this but the ultimate galge has already started." her eyes glinted, "you accepted it yourself."

"Who are you? What are you talking about? Tell me."

She stayed silent, observing his every facial expression.

The truth dawned on him, or rather, that's what his face seemed to show "You're Mai-hime?" Keima looked up to meet her eyes.

_Seriously, reality is such an unpredictable animal!_

"No, please call me Aoba from now on, Fuse Aoba."

…

_He doesn't seem as bad as the rumours say about him...I can't believe I was able to get the courage to ask that._  
>Shiori looked up to the library ceiling and started to daydream, she thought of brightness and shininess.<br>"Excuse me, hello... is anyone there?" a distant voice called._  
>Who is trying to say what to me?<em>  
>"Excuse me!" a boy's voice rammed through her consciousness, "can I borrow this book?"<br>She squealed, shot up from her chair and upon seeing the student, started to blush in embarrassment at what she must've looked to him._  
>Uuu~ what am I doing?<em>


	9. Chapter 8: A mission in Hell

"As I asked before, what do you wish to accomplish by meeting me out here in the real world?" Keima asked angrily, "I won't accept the boundaries of the real world to even come anywhere near close to the game world."

"And were you thinking about that when _you_ captured me that day?" Aoba asked, "Were you thinking that when you so blatantly picked routes for that girl just there, albeit discreet ones I must say."

"So the aim is to capture me, why didn't you just go ahead and do it rather than tell me everything even though you most definitely didn't plan to do it?" Keima asked.

"If you don't know, I don't need to tell you." she retorted and stalked off, leaving Keima on his own.

_She's probably going for the hate to love route, I'd probably not choose that route in that situation... still,I need to keep an eye on her tactics since it's still the beginning. I'll decide later whether I want to actually be captured or not._

He sighed and headed for home.

…

"I'm home!" Elsie sang as she stepped in through the doorway.

"Welcome home El-chan, how was your band practice?" Katsuragi Mari asked.

"It was great! Everything is really starting to come together," Elsie said enthusiastically "although everyone's still worried about finding a drummer for the Dance Festival." she finished, draining almost all of the enthusiasm out in less than a sentence.

"Aww, El-chan, don't worry about it, I'm sure you'll be able to find someone in time after all, nothing is impossible if you believe!" Mari said energetically, succeeding to cheer Elsie up.

"Yes, you're right." Elsie perked up, "I must give everything my best! Therefore, I should go find nii-sama. Is he in his room?"

Mari sighed at why Elsie was so devoted to Keima although she was also relieved that someone would definitely be there for him, "Yes, he's in his room as usual." she smiled.

"Thank you mum, I'll help out when I come back down." and Elsie bolted upstairs.

_I wish Keima could even have a fraction of her personality..._

Keima was in his room being rather lifeless but smiling. As Elsie peered at his desk which was strewn with bits of pieces of paper, she saw a mess of scribbles and all the monitors stuck at the kiss scenes.

_What's been going on in here?_

As she stepped back, she'd somehow tripped forward, sending her hurling towards Keima and she crashed violently into him, hugging him.

"Argh!" he shouted, "What on earth are you doing, you idiot? Get off me!" having woken up to a heavy weight being too close for comfort and a body full of pain.

"I'm so sorry!" Elsie cried, "I'll be careful next time."

Downstairs, Mari heard this exchange and thought: _What lively children I have!_

"Never mind that for now, I need you to search where Goido Yui lives. We're going to her house tomorrow morning." he said with a hint of urgency.

"Why?" Elsie asked as she got her hagoromo to search for Yui's profile.

"I want to confirm whether this'll be an easy capture or not, I suspect that it's a bigger possibility for it to take very little time... have you found it yet?"

"Yep, so we're going to her house tomorrow morning, right?" Elsie said with her usual drive.

_Why is she so energetic about everything?_

…

"Welcome, you are here to hear about the mission that you demons, who have been specially chosen for this, are about to embark on." Dokuro Skull paused for a moment to let the demons chat about it a bit amongst themselves, then he raised his arms, commanding attention, "As you realise, Hell is now in a state of emergency and we now need all the help we can, because the demons in the Far East are now busier with the issue of the hosts' memories so, we've chosen you to assist them with the matter."

"So what will we be doing?" asked one of the demons in the assembly.

"I was coming to that," Dokuro replied, "You will each be assigned to one district and you will be using your own judgement as to how you want to help your teammates. For now, we will have your collars inactive and your buddies will be able to have a rest unless, your buddies want to accompany you in which case we will keep them active. Understand."

"YES!" chorused the demons.

"If you understand, then you should get packing. When you've got back to the human world, tell your buddies about this and your respective chiefs will notify you about which district you've been assigned to." Dokuro paused to make sure everyone had understood and the hall stayed silent, waiting for what he'd say next.

There was nothing else left to say so he just said, "Right. Dismissed."

...

Right now, a demon was in a district in North America packing her bags and waiting for an important call. It wasn't however, the call for the district she was going to temporarily be in. For her, there was another message of which she considered far more important.

_Dorodoron~ Dorodoron~_

She jumped a little as she reached for her sensor to receive the call, "Hello?"

"Fiore Loderia Lavigneri, you have been entrusted a very important task from Vintage." the sender said.

"Wh-what is it?" she asked, trembling with excitement about the prospect of being entrusted a task which they considered important.

"We've made sure that you have been assigned to District 30-2, our mission for you is to investigate the existence of the goddesses who we suspect may be residing around that area. They are the ones who sealed Old Hell all those years ago. We have more demons who will be on this matter but your district has the highest possibility. Don't forget about the revival of the Weiss and don't draw attention to yourself... but don't get caught." and then it cut off.

Fiore now moved about with assurance now; she was to be becoming important and if that wasn't it, then she'd make sure that she would.

_Yes! Thanks to my hard work, I'm now able to undertake such an important mission for Vintage._

To tell the truth, she was not entirely clear about the business about the goddesses but it didn't matter. Whatever mission Vintage gave her, she would do no less than her best. As she thought about this, another message came through.

"Yes?" Fiore asked.

"You've been assigned to District 30-2, please use your initiative to decide the best course of action for this mission." her chief said.

"Yes," she replied with a smirk on her face, "I'll do my utmost to ensure everything goes well."

"That's good to hear." and the other side hung up.


	10. Chapter 9: A useless demon?

More scenes from Tamiki Wakaki's original manga and a vague reference to a recent event.

* * *

><p>"Kami-nii-sama, why are we going to school this early? Can't we wait until later?" Elsie asked as she wondered whether it was appropriate to leave her breakfast half finished on the table.<p>

It was almost certainly going to subject her to Mari's wrath when she came home.

Keima suddenly looked irritated, "You stupid demon, didn't I already tell you last night that we were going to Yui's house to check up on her?"

"What? Weren't you giving me a lecture about fire engines?" she asked back, quite obviously recalling some really random dream she had last night.

"Just show me the blasted way or we'll be wandering around while Yui's already gone." he shouted at her and like that, Elsie obediently led him to the house.

…

In actual fact you couldn't call it a house. Even if you called it a mansion, you would've underrated it. It was so huge, you wouldn't have trouble finding it but it probably would've been easier to get lost _inside_ it. Elsie was gawping at the 'mansion'. However, Keima wasn't surprised at its size or grandeur as mansions always seemed to be something like that for some of the rich heroines. Even so, he had to check with Elsie to make sure it was this place. As Elsie was done checking, it seemed that it was a pointless waste of time as Yui's mother stepped out with Yui following behind. The mother seemed to be making some light conversation with her. But then, it didn't seem like Yui's heart was in it.

"Elsie, can you make it so that I can hear their conversation? They're too far away." Keima urged.

"Understood." and she did something with her hagoromo and suddenly, the sound was crystal clear.

...

"Oh dear, Yui, you're still carrying your drumsticks around. You've got to remember that you've already quit the wind instrument club." Yui's mother said while slipping the drumsticks out of Yui's bag, "Okamoto, Take these back inside, they're heavy."

Yui could not help staring wistfully after the drumsticks. Her music, her freedom was being snatched away by none other than her mother... yet again.

But she looked down in resignation and replied: "Yes, mother. I just hadn't been thinking properly."

"Now that's a good girl." the mother said as she ushered Yui into the car.

Yui tried to take one last glance at the drumsticks but upon looking back, she found that the doors for her home had already closed.

_I wanted to play to my heart's content. So why can I not play? _

…

"So that's the problem..." Keima said thoughtfully.

"With her mother around, it'll be difficult to even just get close." Elsie said worriedly.

"Don't worry, the capture will be finished by tonight if everything goes according to plan." he said confidently.

"How can you say that so confidently, are you trying to jinx yourself?" Elsie replied worriedly, "You did that last time and then it took you ages."

"Hmph, you still don't know anything don't you?" he smiled, "It's a setting you'll find in older galge where the heroine is subjected to huge pressure from her family but is unable to do anything about it. The solution would be to destroy the source of her pressure which is her house."

"Understood." as Elsie's hagoromo manifested in the shape of a drill, "Where should we start?"

Keima looked at her uncomprehendingly for an instant and suddenly found himself considering it might be a good idea to actually destroy her house. That is of course, until the caretaker of the house suddenly ran out and shooed them from the house, yelling the most inappropriate curses at them.

"It's risky and takes too much time. We'll go for the love route as always." Keima replied as he ran but couldn't help but feel slightly let down by the notion he wasn't going to be able to destroy the house.

In some ways, destroying te house physically was a less stressful route (in fact it would probably help him deal with it), but there was a bigger chance of it getting out of hand. The love route was also disadvantageous as he'd have to contend to the other girls but then he only needed to last a day and with luck, he wouldn't meet the others. In any case, he'd already set up the love route yesterday so there wouldn't be any point in wasting it. He walked with Elsie in tow who was still wondering what her brother had planned for the next target.

…

When he'd got to the classroom, he found that one of the desks at the back row was surrounded by people talking excitedly.

_What's happening here? _Keima thought as he strolled to his desk.

He looked behind him at the crowd and realised that it was Asami's desk.

_Come to think of it, Asami hasn't been in school since the beginning of term._

He scanned for Elsie and co. and found that they were also listening in on what the crowd were talking about. He turned his attention back to his PFP. Although he knew he was fighting a losing battle against time, he wasn't going to give up trying to squeeze even the extra few _seconds_ of gaming time he could possibly get from his restricted days. As Nikaido-sensei came in and homeroom began, the crowd dispersed evenly into seats around the classroom, revealing the girl staring wistfully at the back of Katsuragi Keima.

…

"Elsie, can you come here a sec?" Keima gestured at her to come, while she'd been talking to her friends during break.

"Oh, okay." and she trotted over to him as her friends whispered to her about how she could cope with him at any time of the day.

"He's a kind person at heart!" she pouted and all but Ayumi laughed at this.

Not that Keima had noticed as he became irritated and called for Elsie again, saying how she should come immediately without delay whatever happened.

"What's the matter?" Elsie asked him after seeing that he'd calmed down a bit.

"What were they talking to Asami about this morning?" he asked, his face buried back in his PFP.

"Oh, you know Asami wasn't able to attend school since the beginning of the term, it turns out some volcano blew up somewhere and she ended up stuck on holiday. I wasn't able to hear where though." Elsie explained.

"I see." then Keima asked, "Does it make any difference to the state of her memories?"

"Yes." came her reply, "But you should ask Haqua about the rest because I didn't exactly completely listen to everything because I didn't think it would be relevant..." she finished slowly and cautiously.

"Do you ever get anything right?" he yelled, ignoring the startled students who gave him angry glares as usual, "What is wrong with your sense of co-ordination and organisation? You do the wrong things, say the wrong things and miss out the relevant bits. How do you expect me to accomplish everything by myself without even a scrap of useful information?" He gasped for breath as he did every time he finished ranting at Elsie who was now reduced to a puddle of tears.

Somehow, that disturbed him a little or rather, it could be translated as: _what if she does absolutely nothing? I'd be really stuck._

He sighed, he was now stuck on the only route that could remotely salvage the situation.

"Elsie, you may be a bugged demon but I guess you still can help on the little things with your demon magic." he grunted reluctantly.

Elsie stopped, she looked up in surprise at the blatant kindness of her 'brother', the One she looked up to as the 'Capturing God', she asked "Really?"

"Don't give me that, I've already been clear enough." he grunted as he looked back to his PFP feeling a little embarrassed actually. "In any case, that means I can leave Asami alone for a bit longer, it's probably a good thing, I'll have more time for my games."

Elsie sighed, he wasn't going to change easily.

...

Ayumi watched the exchange between Elsie and Katsuragi and when he started shouting at her, Ayumi had pretty much given up on him.  
><em>As expected, he's just the worst kind of scum you can find in this world.<br>_So it was a surprise to her as Katsuragi suddenly displayed his warmer side, even if they weren't the best choice of words. For Katsuragi, those words held alot of meaning behind them. Nobody would expect him to display any sort of kindness in any form.  
>Chihiro caught her looking, but she said nothing.<p> 


	11. Chapter 10: A surprise for all

At lunchtime, Keima decided he'd still have to do something about Asami and whispered his plan to Elsie and what he expected of her.

"Understood." Elsie saluted him.

_Pray to God she won't mess this up, _and Keima hoped for the best.

...

Halfway through lunch, Asami came back into the classroom and slumped on the desk, slightly taken aback by the attention she'd somehow got. She suddenly heard the voice of someone who she'd always admired.

"Dammit, I keep forgetting to bring my lunch these days because of all the trouble I have to deal with."

_I'm surprised, what sort of trouble does he have 'these days'?_

"Kami-nii-sama, do you want to eat the lunch I've made?" his sister produced a box of something Asami couldn't ever see since the box always seemed to be angled away from her, not that she noticed.

"No, no, no. I won't eat that to save my life, because I'd be dead anyway." he said, backing away cautiously.

For some strange reason, his head kept swivelling around the room until his eyes settled on her, silently pleading. Asami however, just blushed.

_H-h-he looked at me! What should I do? Should I-_

Before she could finish her thoughts, Keima had already blasted out of the classroom. She'd missed her chance, however it had come to her.

…

Keima ran downstairs and straight to the open grounds of the school where a lot of people were having lunch. Where he went wasn't his concern. Although that scene with Asami was an act, there was no doubt in his mind that Elsie would do all she could to get that disgusting grub down his throat, given the chance. Unfortunately, his limited stamina meant that even with the adrenaline coursing through his system, Elsie was still able to easily... well, attack him. Actually, he found that it was actually much better to have come here since she couldn't use her hagoromo (as she might have done if they'd gone to the rooftop). In any case, it seemed that Elsie had given up the chase anyway. In some ways, he was actually thankful to Ayumi, Chihiro and Miyako though it wasn't something he was going to voice... not in a million years. As he scanned behind him for any sign of Elsie he spotted Aoba, who was walking straight up to him.

"Now there's nothing to argue about." she said.

"About what?" Keima asked.

"You have been manipulating the hearts of other girls, I know it when I see it." she replied.

"And I told you that it's none of your business."

"I won't let you have your own way anymore because there only one route I want you to chose." her expression had softened.

"Which is?" he asked while pulling his PFP from his pocket, now that he'd recovered sufficiently enough from his mad dash.

What happened next genuinely surprised him; he suddenly found Aoba, the genius girl had lunged towards him and hugged him.

"I love you, I don't care whether you believe it or not but I just wanted to tell you this." she... sobbed?

_What's happened to being the 'Ice Princess' archtype? Is she even able to swap between façades?_

Keima felt himself losing his grip on things, even his PFP, "Argh! Get off me! Get off me now!"

He flailed around trying to get her off him. Fortunately, everyone else was to far away to have heard what Fuse Aoba's outburst was but the scene they saw didn't help Keima's already badly tarnished reputation. It seems that there will be even more ridiculous rumours of him flying around. For Aoba though, this abrupt response from Keima surprised her. She'd expected some other response but she was really taken aback by this. Her eyes widened as she looked into his face, giving Keima a chance to tear away from that (from Keima's point of view) cursed embrace.

"Your face has gone all red." she said simply, drying her eyes and still trying to process this information.

"Sh-shut up, h-how much longer do you want to stick your nose into my business? You're a terrible person!"

She suddenly laughed, a genuine laugh which for many others would have sounded like music. For Keima though, it felt like a burn.

"What are you laughing about?" he yelled angrily, "I will hate you for eternity."

Aoba's laughter subsided into a bright smile, "You have an unexpectedly cute side to you."

He was still blushing, "G-go away." he grunted, turning away from her, determined to hide his face.

"Sure, I'll see you later." she said and skipped happily away.

_That freak. _

...

Keima returned to the classroom where Elsie was chatting with her friends. Elsie noticed that Keima seemed somewhat haggard and decided to ask what the matter was.

"I met Aoba down there a while ago and had a bit of a bad spell."

He spotted the lunchbox that Elsie had been trying to force him to eat and grabbed it.

"N-nii-sama? You know, Asami's in here..."

He ignored her.

_Right, time to knock myself out. At least it doesn't taste bad..._

He threw the contents down his gullet.

...

"Kami-sama, what did you do that for?" Elsie cried as she watched Keima's face slowly turning pale.

She couldn't help noting that it had turned green last time but then, it wasn't the time for it.

"We need to get him to the infirmary, quickly!" Elsie panicked.

"Wow, what on earth did you cook for him? That was a pretty fast reaction." Chihiro commented.

"Now's not the time for that, can someone help me?" Elsie was getting desperate.

"No way; I'll get his otaku germs." Chihiro and Miyako said while shying away.

So it surprised them when Ayumi decided that she would offer to help carry him. Elsie stared at Ayumi with a hint of surprise.

"Hurry up Elsie, I'm not carrying him by myself you know." she said energetically, "Cheer up, okay."

"Y-yeah." and they heaved him to the infirmary.

...

Asami watched this strange series of events unfold before her. As she was about to offer to carry Katsuragi Keima with his sister (who she honestly wasn't well acquainted with), she was slightly let down when Ayumi had offered to do it.

_Why do I keep letting the chances slip away? _She mentally chided herself while hitting her head.

...

He groaned as he woke up, he had a throbbing headache and his stomach felt like jelly.

_Aww man, I hope it wasn't brain damage; I can't afford that, I still need to ace tests and capture my heroines._

He shook violently as he was reminded of what happened last time he ate the strange stuff when his muscles seized up and condemned him to bed for two days. He wouldn't have minded if he was able to play but he was completely paralysed.

_I really shouldn't have done that... _

He glanced at the clock in the infirmary; 2:43pm.

_Thank goodness that school hasn't ended yet, I guess I can spend a bit of time playing here since the nurse isn't here._

He got his PFP out and started to play. A few minutes later the nurse came back in and upon seeing him playing, drove him out of the infirmary and back into his lesson.

_Well, I guess it doesn't matter where I play. _He thought and continued with his gaming.


	12. Chapter 11: Fortunately, A good result

More bits and bobs from Wakaki Tamiki's creation... I don't own it, except for my original ideas that is.

* * *

><p>He was annoyed, immensely annoyed at his own carelessness. He decided to inflict blame on Elsie. But that wasn't possible.<p>

_Why can't Elsie make something normal to eat for a change? Look what she's done..._

…

Keima first noticed this as he dragged Elsie to brief on their next meeting with Yui. As he ran, he'd been trying to speak but nothing came out.

_Hey, what's wrong?_

He stopped running and tried to speak. Still no sound came out.

"Kami-nii-sama, are you alright?" she asked, concerned that he might be turning into a fish.

He did not answer, instead, he looked at her with a confused face which suddenly became one of outrage. Elsie was being pummelled out of the blue without an explanation.

"What are you doing? Stop it!" she cried.

He quickly took his PFP out and started typing furiously. He then shoved it into her face gesturing for her to read it.

"Hmm, okay... 'It's your fault that I've now lost my voice. Don't you ever shove your crackpot bentos to me ever again.'" she read, it slowly dawned on her as to what she'd done.

"I'm so sorry, I'll never do that again." she exclaimed frantically, "But why did you eat it anyway?"

Keima was already typing before she'd finished and it wasn't an answer to her question.

"Let's see... 'We will proceed with the original plan. Be sure not to mess this up.'"

"What do you want me to do?" Elsie asked.

"'Make yourself invisible with the hagoromo on the stairs. After that, I want you to trip Yui up with something, can you do that?'"

"Ehh~ why?"

"'No questions.'"

…

The plan Keima had come up with was relatively risky and depended on factors coming into play at the right time. For every capture, he would need to practise his lines to make sure they were perfect and to make sure about that, he had a sound recording software downloaded onto his PFP. Although he didn't really need to use it anymore, it was a habit he'd gotten used to now. It was a relief that it was now truly coming in handy. All he needed to do was mime and make sure he'd got volume control right. As for his lines, he wasn't concerned about it at all, he'd always hit them spot on. Today would be no exception. He stood at the bottom of the stairs waiting for Yui to appear and hopefully, trip down the stairs again. He heard an ever increasing volume of steps which were coming towards him.

_Okay, get ready._

Suddenly he heard a squeal behind him and they collided. Her voice filled his ears and he prayed that she wouldn't notice the lack of sound coming from him. Actually, he was hoping a lot of things like not noticing the slightly dim sound quality and getting the timing of his pause/play absolutely right. Whatever happened, he was already thrown into it. There was no turning back. He got ready with his PFP and started to concentrate.

"I-I'm extremely sorry! I wasn't looking where I was going..." Yui stuttered.

"Oh, it's you again. You are quite incredible, you know that." the PFP played softly while he mimed. It sounded slightly muffled.

She didn't notice as she realised it was Keima, "Oh dear, I'm so sorry. I keep crashing into you and causing you trouble." she sunk into thought as she contemplated on what to do.

"You have fallen into me two days in a row, aren't we fated?" he replied, as much as he'd like to get closer for maximum impact, he couldn't risk blowing his cover as well... a temporary mute (he hoped).

_I destroy her house by being more important than it. I cannot afford to go wrong this is the only chance I have._

She looked up in surprise and wondered how to counter that. Fortunately, she didn't have to as he stood up, picking her bag up for her and returned it to her silently with just a gentlemanly smile.

"Thank you very much." Yui replied, and turned to walk down the stairs.

He whipped out his PFP and it said: "Do you really like playing the drums?"

Yui half turned to him and answered, "Yes, I love them very much."

Keima made sure to keep his PFP in her blind spot, "You... truly looked divine yesterday, when you were playing." he looked straight into her eyes, "I wonder, what sound your heart played in that moment?"

_Yui's mother should be coming soon I need to squeeze this in quickly._

"I was surprised to meet you ag-", he was cut off as Yui's mother bowled him over, his PFP clattered away from him.

"You scum, don't you dare come near Yui again. If you do, I'll make sure you have no future!" Yui's mother screeched at him.

Yui was being pulled away by her mother. He had to get the final line in quickly. He scampered after his PFP grabbed it and to his relief, it wasn't destroyed or frozen but it was back on the main menu.

_God mode._

He navigated his way through to the software, became impatient while it was loading and decided to run after them while it did. It loaded and he navigated through the recordings.

"Aren-", "you reall-", "divine","-art pla-", "beca-", "Oh my-" after a bit of sifting he'd found the right place. He ran towards the car and held his PFP high on maximum volume, "Next time we meet, let me hear the sound of your heart."

Yui looked around and stared at him while he stuffed his PFP back into his pocket. She looked rather wistful. Then he had to run the opposite way as Yui's mother chased him away shouting more obscenities.

_The last line sound a bit funny since I was supposed to say it in a soft voice. Oh well, as long as I've got the right impact._

"Kami-nii-sama, that was wonderful! How did you do that?" Elsie asked, happy about the fact that her brother had somehow been able to stick to the plan without his voice.

He turned towards the school gates and started to make his journey back. To his surprise, it seemed that Elsie was following him and probably skipping band practice. He started typing into his PFP and showed it to her.

"'Don't you have band practice?'"

"Actually, I forgot to tell you that during afternoon break, Nora sent me a message to get back as soon as school ends." Elsie replied.

"'What business has that violent woman got with us?'" she read.

"I don't know. She just told me to get back home quickly." she replied to it.

Keima half-sighed; _More stupid things to think about, reality was just too harsh. Why is this the price for staying alive?_


	13. Chapter 12: Good news and capture?

Sure enough, when they'd reached home, Nora was sitting on one of the tables drinking tea and eating cake. She wasn't with her buddy.

"Hey, Elsie's buddy, your mum makes surprisingly decent food." Nora commented as soon as she spotted them come in through the doorway.

_Thanks. _He thought as he typed a message for Elsie.

"'I'm going to listen in on this but I've got to go upstairs and charge up this PFP and get a spare. I'll be right back.'" Elsie read.

Keima decided to type something else, "'You don't need to give Nora an explanation, she doesn't need to know. Just say I lost my voice.'"

He then trotted upstairs to his room.

"What's wrong with him?" Nora asked, her face showing perplexity.

"Oh nothing, he just lost his voice." Elsie replied.

"Are you keeping something from me?" Nora asked, unconvinced.

"N-n-no, of course not, hahaha." it really was so obvious that she was hiding something.

…

"'So, what did you come to talk about?'" Keima 'said'.

Nora sighed, "Being a district chief is such a chore. It's good reputation but all you really do is relay messages..."

"'Just tell me...!'" Elsie tried to read as forcefully as possible, though this just earned a withering look from Keima and full throated laughter from Nora.

"Seriously, I really wonder how you can capture that many spirits when you have Elsie as your partner." Nora chuckled.

"'(Read it normally) This isn't about us, can we get onto the subject now?'" Elsie cited.

_Why did she even read the stuff in brackets? _Keima thought hopelessly.

"Sure." Nora said while still giggling, "Gosh, Elsie never fails to entertain me!"

"'If you didn't come for anything important, we're in a hurry to prepare for the next runaway spirit host.'"

"You've already found another one? That's quick." she commented, "Anyway, apparently, all the districts in the Far East are going to be assisted by another elite demon from other continents. Our one is going to be arriving tomorrow but they haven't told us who it is so we'll be finding out tomorrow. I just hope that the one we've been sent doesn't cause trouble for me. I'm already busy enough without someone else creating problems for me." Nora finished haughtily.

_An elite demon huh? Well anyone's going to be better than Elsie. _

"Well, that's pretty much it so good luck and I'm finished here." Nora turned to go.

"'Wait, I have a question.'"

"What is it?" half turning back to Keima to find him typing like some crazed robot. _What the heck?_

He shoved the PFP to her face but instead of reading it, she rebuked him: "Why do I have to read from that stupid thing of yours? Tell Elsie to read it."

_Does she not know how to read...?_

"'If a host has been abroad, what happens with their memories?'"

Nora considered this for a moment and answered: "They stay altered."

"'Explanation?'"

"The maintaining machine keeps the memories altered and she's been hooked up to the one where she'd been staying... good enough answer for you?"

"'Yes, you can go now.'" Keima then showed her out.

"You are a strange man, you know that?" she commented.

"No stranger than you." he was finally able to rasp.

Nora laughed as she left, "Your throat really is knackered but Elsie won't tell me why." and she was up in the sky.

…

Yui wasn't listening to the light conversation her family was having even though everyone in the family was here together for the first time in ages.

_Who is he? Is that man really the one who back-chatted mother in such a rude way. He looks so gentlemanly with me even though his voice is a little weird..._

She couldn't not help being confused about this strange man who had suddenly crashed into her life.

...

"'Elsie, are you able to do something with your hagoromo?'"

"Like what?" she asked.

"'If I gave you a script, can you give the illusion that I'm talking?'"

"I think I can but it's too much for me to be able to master the timing of your speech." Elsie asked, worried.

"'Don't worry, I'll mime accordingly.'"

"You just spoke to Nora there, can't you just speak?" Elsie asked... rather stupidly.

"'Don't be a fool! There's no way I will speak to her in this voice and it hurts to try.'" his expression was absolutely frightening.

"I-I'll t-t-try my be-best." Elsie said while cowering from Keima.

"El-chan!" Mari called while stepping into the room, "Hey, where's your friend gone?"

"She left, she probably has lots of important things to do." Elsie said.

"Oh, okay." she turned to Keima, "Why are you so quiet? It's rude to ignore everyone you know."

"Ah, nii-sama lost his..." Keima was jabbing the screen to get her to read it.

"Okay...'We're going out tonight, don't worry about us. We'll be home before 10.'" she read.

"So why have you got El-chan to tell me what you're saying?" Keima's mother asked.

Keima got up gestured for Elsie to explain the rest and headed upstairs.

…

Mari had been laughing for quite some time after Elsie had told her what happened. It seems she'd told her everything. Keima wasn't too concerned, as long as mum didn't find it strange, it was good enough for him. It was about 7 o'clock so they'd already had dinner and Keima decided that now was the time to strike.

"Do we need to go already?" Elsie asked, having yet again left her dinner half finished.

_Elsie is such a slowcoach, I've already changed and got the ladder out and ready._

"Yes, we need to strike while the iron's still hot. If she's still vulnerable and confused, it'll be easier to get the ideal impact." he rasped though his voice was noticeably better than before. He adjusted his cuffs.

"I see." although Elsie _didn't_ see.

"Okay, let operation 'spending time together with the knight at night, one night gigolo' commence!" he ended up spluttering the sentence as his throat decided to give him hell.

He leaned against the wall as his body suddenly felt incredibly weak and floppy.

"'Elsie, have you got the script ready?'" giving up on his voice.

"Yes." she answered, "But are you alright? You look like you're on the verge of collapsing."

"'I'm okay, I must get this event.'"

"But you've been knocked down, kicked and... you've got food poisoning. We should stop and let you recover."

Keima raised his PFP to type in something but his hands were shaking violently and couldn't type. Then he did the most uncharacteristic thing ever. He dropped his PFP.

_What?_

He bent over to pick it up but his body couldn't handle the change in balance and he collapsed on the floor, blacking out.

…

Yui was having dinner with the whole family and couldn't help feeling isolated.

_Everyone is so assertive about everything but why am I the only one who is not answering with my heart?_

She let her mind wonder and she thought of that mysterious man again.

_I wonder what he is doing. I wonder whether I'll be able to meet him again._

She realised that she'd zoned out but she couldn't seem to pull herself back to the conversation on the table. She could hear vague shouts as if through a thick glass, the scenery suddenly changed and she felt immense pain course through her body as she blacked out.


	14. Chapter 13: An unexpected development

Yui's arc starts now and I've just realised that it's going to be veeeery long. I hope I don't get asked questions by the teacher during class because I'm most likely going to be zoning out lol. Enough about me, here's 'me' latest chapter. ^o^ Not that I needed to say that...

* * *

><p>The first thing Keima heard was a lot of incoherent shouting.<p>

"Argh, where's my PFP?"

That was the second thing he heard.

_What? Who's talking, it's _my_ PFP... which isn't here anymore..._

He realised that it was bright in the room but his eyes didn't feel pain of having to adjust. He turned towards the source of the squawking and yelling and realised he had no idea who... _no wait, isn't that Yui's mother?_

He bolted upright and rather than looking at the worried faces of those in front of him, he scrambled up and opened the door behind him, revealing a traditional Japanese garden.

"What the heck?" he said and realised that it was Yui's voice.

…

"Are you alright?" a sweet girl's voice asked, "You really need to rest, you know."

"I-I'm fine." she quickly realised she wasn't as pain tore through her throat as she spoke, it was also incredibly raspy.

Somehow she ended up on a dark street with a worried woman and a worried girl standing over her... what?

"Wh-" she spluttered as her throat seized up, preventing her from even uttering a cry of surprise.

"Keima, we need to get you back in, come on." said the woman.

Yui stood up obediently and walked with them into a café.

_Keima? Who's that? And I suddenly feel uncomfortable and... tall?_

"Kami-nii-sama, you haven't brought in your PFP. What's wrong?" said the girl.

It was then that Yui looked down to the girl who was picking up a little game console that she saw what she was wearing.

_Why am I wearing a suit? Who _are _these people? Why have I got glasses on?_

She made to take them off but her surroundings suddenly became incredibly blurry so she hurriedly put them back on again, feeling slightly disorientated.

She went inside and as she passed a glass cabinet, she froze.

_I've, I've... isn't this that man...?_

At that moment, the phone rang and as the woman helped her to a table, the girl went to get the phone.

A few moments later, Yui was feeling paralysed by this sudden situation and was still unable to talk. The girl came back with a confused expression and asked: "Ar-are you Yui, Goido Yui?"

Yui was about to reply 'yes', thought better and just nodded her head.

…

"Elsie listen, I think that somehow, me and Yui have swapped bodies. I need you to come to Yui's house immediately. Got it?" Keima said and hung up.

He decided to navigate around the house to get a sense of what it was like.

After ten minutes of memorising the layout of the house, he finally found the front entrance where Elsie and... 'himself' were already waiting. 'Keima' immediately ran towards him and realised 'he' shouldn't speak.

"Elsie, come here. I need to speak to you and you only." giving 'himself' (I'll just call them by their proper names from now...) a meaningful look then gesturing for Yui to stay out of it since she didn't seem to have understood.

Elsie came to him and to his dismay, he found that Yui's body was only slightly taller than Elsie's. He wasn't fond of that feeling at all.

"I've been thinking about this and I think it was the runaway spirit's doing. When Yui met me, her overwhelming desire to be freed from her household overlapped with my meeting thus causing us to swap... what is it?" he asked when Elsie looked at him weirdly.

"Ah, it's nothing. Just feels weird talking to you when you're a girl." Elsie replied.

"Whatever, I don't like this either. If Hell hadn't messed up, things could've been much easier." he then turned to Yui who was staring at them uncertainly, it looked slightly disturbing.

"Yui, I want you to try and live normally as me. At least until I can think of something. Understand?"

Yui nodded his head and Keima saw the collar.

_Oh man, why does this world keep throwing stupid and unreasonable events at me?_

He heard something stampeding towards him somewhere in the distance, he turned towards the sound and found it was Yui's mother. Before he could respond though, he saw 'himself' running towards her shouting 'Mother!' and it was too late as he saw his body flying through the air.

"You scum! How did you manage to find your way here to the Yui household?" she raged, "Okamoto, call the police!" she screamed running back in.

"Elsie, get away now, I don't to return to a body on a hospital bed!" Keima called as Elsie picked up his unconscious body and ran away.

A few moments later, Yui's mother came panting back, "Where have they gone... don't tell me that you were meeting up with that terrible guy."

"Of course not mother, I just told told them to quit bothering me." Keima deliberately put it that way, "Anyway, it's been a long day for me, I'd like to take a bath and retire for now."

Yui's mother looked at the passing figure of Yui and wondered whatever was wrong with her.

…

When Elsie came home with Keima's body under her arm, this had no doubt, shocked their mother a lot.

"Elsie, what's happened to Keima? He looks even worse than before. Where on earth did you go?" Mari asked worriedly, on closer inspection she realised he was bruised, "Elsie tell me, has someone been abusing him?"

"N-no, he fell on the floor while... you know..." Elsie said hopelessly.

Mari looked at Elsie for a bit and said, "Poor Keima, what's he been doing to get himself this badly exhausted- he wasn't like this even on that time he played for one week straight without sleeping..."

Elsie let out a sigh of relief as she realised that Mari decided not to question her any further, "I'd better get him to bed, I think that may be all he needs."

"Yeah, I guess so."

…

Keima sat in the outdoor bath staring out into space. There was nothing for him to do except think and that wasn't something he particularly wanted to do.

_I should've told Elsie to bring my PFP with her, now I've got nothing to do and it's not like real bodies are that different to in-game bodies, the only difference is _that_ weight._

After a while, he knew there was no avoiding the fact that he had to think about what to do. If he got this wrong, things could go very badly and he didn't want Yui tripping some bad flags or anything.

_As much as I want to get help from the demon who is coming tomorrow, I don't think I can really trust her. After all, the Far East office was _sabotaged_ so I can't trust anyone new... In a normal situation this might be good for Yui who will have to make her own decisions while living as me but I'd rather be in control of the situation when it's so hectic._

Usually, Keima was able to think calmly in tight situations but he found himself getting impatient and after not very long at all, he gave up.

_I haven't got my games, I'm a girl and everything sucks. I'm definitely going to go to Narusawa City tomorrow, buy every galge I haven't got and all the other stuff plus, get Elsie to carry it here with her hagoromo. Everything will be absolutely fine after that._

He got out of the bath and decided that it was a long day and he should go to bed. It sounded like a good plan.


	15. Chapter 14: A start to the first day

Yui woke up to find that everything around her was undistinguishable.

_Wh-what's happened? Why can't I see anything? Why is my body throbbing with pain?_

She groped around to get a sense of where she was. She just ended up just knocking things everywhere, causing a huge clatter which were shortly followed by running footsteps from the next room. The door banged open.

"What are you doing?" a girl came into the room and Yui heard a loud crunch, "Oh no, I've broken one of Kami-sama's PFPs, what should I do...?"

"Umm, can you tell me what's going on, I can't seem to see very well at all." Yui spoke uncertainly, it wasn't painful to speak anymore but the voice was still a little scratchy.

"Ah, I'm sorry Yui," she rummaged on the floor a bit where Yui had scattered the contents of Keima's bedside table, "Here's your glasses, put them on." she said cheerfully.

"Thank you..." Yui said while putting them on, the room immediately came into focus.

_Am I still dreaming?_

She looked to the girl and asked in a torrent: "I'm sorry, but who are you, what's happened and where am I?"

The girl smiled at her and answered enthusiastically: "I'm Katsuragi Elsea, you can call me Elsie if you like, my brother can explain when we get to school and you're in my brother's room posing as him from now on."

Although Yui wasn't satisfied with the answer, she was brought up to be polite and in any case, she was desperate for the loo.

"Umm, may you show me where the toilet is? I'm desperate." Yui said, slightly surprised at what she said at the end her sentence.

"With pleasure." and Elsie walked her to the bathroom door, "Take your time."

Yui bolted the door and saw the reflection in the mirror; what stared back at her was a boy with a girlish face wearing a white suit. What struck her most was the word 'boy'. She looked at the toilet and then back at the mirror.

_I-I d-d-don't know how men... do it. _She thought awkwardly.

The desire to go to the toilet immediately went away for the time being and she decided that it might be a better idea to... well, wait until later. She got out to find Elsie waiting on the landing who said: "That was quick." and went in straight after.

Yui found that there was another challenge waiting when she stepped into this 'Kami' person's room and found his school uniform hanging in front of a cupboard.

_This is bad, I can't not change for school, what do I do?_

The answer came quickly when she spotted the tie that she was currently wearing; she could simply blindfold herself.

_Right, here goes..._

It took her ages to change though and by the time she got downstairs with a slightly hot face, she was going to be late for school. Elsie came up and grabbed her, rushing out of the house while stuffing Keima's toast to her.

"We mustn't be late! We need to talk to Kami-nii-sama!" Elsie said.

…

When they'd gotten to the gates of school, they weren't late yet but Yui was huffing and puffing from the dash to school.

_I usually get driven to school, h-how did I get myself into this mess?_

"Let's go." Elsie smiled, skipping towards the school.

"Yes." she puffed.

_I wasn't this unfit during PE class, this is a really extreme feeling._

She winced as she experienced the stitch in her side. Elsie meanwhile, had decided to skip on ahead leaving her to endure the struggle to school on her own. She was so absorbed in getting to the destination in this unfamiliar body, she did not notice the presence beside her until it made itself heard.

"Katsuragi-senpai, I have a little favour to ask of you." she turned towards the voice to find a girl with messy hair, fidgeting around a little.

_'Yui, I want you to try and live normally as me.'_

"What is it?" Yui asked.

"I want you to watch me swim after school because you said that you'd watch over me..." she said, faltering towards the end.

_Oh dear, would he reject her or not._

She recalled his gentlemanly smile and decided that he wouldn't want to hurt the little girl.

"Sure, after all, I don't have anything to do after school."

As she said this, she felt a satisfying sense of release, then she realised a mistake.

_What if he's joined a club?_

"Thank you so much" the little girl said while blushing happily, "Make sure you come!" and she ran off.

Yui stood there staring after the girl wondering whether she'd made the right choice and was still out of breath. It didn't help when the school bell rang.

_What has become of me?_

She struggled and tripped and hauled herself to class 2-A.

…

Keima looked out of the classroom window staring into space when he'd usually be playing his games.

"There will be a transfer student transferring in today, please make her comfortable and be good friends with her." said the homeroom teacher of class 2-A.

Almost immediately, somebody barged in panting heavily. When the person spoke, it was absolutely impossible for Keima to ignore this voice. It sounded exactly like his own except the fact it was still a little raspy from yesterday.

"I'm so sorry I'm late, sensei!" Keima's body bowed low towards the teacher.

_Oh God, what the hell are you thinking of?_

The teacher looked surprised and then told 'him' to go away.

_Actually, I forgot to tell her which classroom I'm supposed to be in..._

"Yeah, go back to your classroom _next door_ where you belong." Keima stood up and said coldly.

Yui suddenly blushed and started out of the classroom. He found that people were congratulating 'her' for driving away 'himself' or what they referred to as 'Otamegane'.

...

Yui softly closed the door behind her. She bumped into an unfamiliar person who was also wearing the school's uniform. But she was impatient to get to what was now going to be her classroom.

"Ah, excuse me." Yui exclaimed and hurried towards classroom 2-B.

Yui took a deep breath and slammed the door open, she was ignored. She then bowed down at a 90° angle and exclaimed: "I'm sorry for being late, sensei!"

This outburst seemed to have a much bigger impact than she'd expected as the students turned around with shocked faces and the teacher dropped the chalk she was using to write on the blackboard. The room went deathly silent.

_Have I done something strange?_

The teacher asked testily: "Katsuragi, why are you late?" she showed a face so intense, it was worthy of being a demon's.

Yui froze. Like how rabbits would do when confronted by the pair of headlights of impending fate. The teacher saw this reaction, gave up on her and class activity soon returned to normal. It was almost as if it never happened. She looked around and saw Elsie who was frantically pointing to an empty seat.

_That must be my seat._

After a while of thinking and not really reaching a conclusion, she decided that it was nothing and settled down for the day.


	16. Chapter 15: A transfer into class 2A

For Keima, posing as a Yui was a simple job. He had played 967 of these archetypes throughout his life already... in his galges. It also seemed that Yui's mother was rather impressed by her all of a sudden, even though he could not contribute a lot to the unnecessary conversations that Yui's mother tended to talk about. All in all, an uneventful morning for Keima for he was, at the time, deprived of his galge and screaming inside for his PFP.

_Damn you reality, why won't you let me play even though there's nothing for me to do._

The only plus was that he didn't need to walk to school but it wasn't all that great, if it meant sacrifice that overwhelmed anything else that could exist in this world... in his point of view anyway.

…

Katsuragi walked into classroom 2-A and immediately headed for Yui's seat and sat down. As the Capturing God, it would've been a disgrace not to know even the most basic knowledge about the capture target. He decided to familiarise himself with the classroom and looked around. Through the groups of his now chatting classmates, he spotted a little girl which was far too small to be in this year.

_Of course, other captured targets will be in this class. This could help my job of monitoring the girls, especially the ones who could be stalking me. They will be too preoccupied with following 'me' to notice 'Yui'._

He turned back to Tsukiyo and wondered whether she should've been on the roof. He looked closely and found that she was rather fidgety.

_It may seem that I _have_ made an impact on her. Hard not to though. Anyway, my job now is finding a way back to my body and forcing the spirit out of Yui, I guess I can observe the other girls as a side job._

He got bored and decided to wait for Elsie and Yui to see how he could progress with Yui. Of course, they never came but another former target came trotting in. He stared at her and she spotted him staring at her.

"Good morning Yui." she came to him, "Why are you looking at me like that? Have I got something on my face?"

"Mio. Oh, well, I was just day-dreaming." Keima replied.

"Really? What could be bothering you enough for you to start daydreaming?" she asked skeptically.

"Well this and that." Keima glanced up to see her reaction.

"Hey, tell me." Mio tugged her arm playfully.

"Well, I had to quit the wind instrument club a couple of days ago. I was really looking forward to the Dance festival as well..." he ventured.

"Oh, I see."

The homeroom teacher came in and told the class to all sit in their seats. Mio complied and the whole class seemed to be looking forward to something.

_Is there something happening or is this class always like this?_

He stared out of the window, wistful for his games.

_Why do I have to listen to the teacher anyway._

But seeing as there wasn't anything else to do, he might as well try. In the next moment though, his voice resounded through the classroom...

…

After the calamities, the class settled down again and he felt that the class was still tense, especially the boys, he noticed.

_What am I doing; noticing what the boys are doing?_

He clutched Yui's head in despair while the teacher was talking about something. The class cheered and a clear voice cut through the air.

"It's nice to meet you. My name is Fiore Loderia Lavigneri and I will be transferring into class 2-A. Please take care of me." the new girl said.

"Wow, where did you come from?" asked one of Yui's male classmates.

"I'm from North America, my mother is Canadian and my father is Greek." she replied.

Keima decided to take a look at this girl, he wasn't interested but he was bored enough to see which column he'd fit this Fiore into. After all, she'd come from another country so she probably wasn't going to be a background character. In fact, he found that she was far from that as he saw the typical hagoromo floating around her shoulders and a spirit sensor attached to her head.

_No way, the new demon is transferring into _this_ school?  
><em>

The 'new demon' spotted him looking and as she turned towards him, he noticed the spirit sensor suddenly let out a faint silver glimmer and then it blinked bright red.

_Dorodoro~ Dorodoro~_

Fiore jumped as she was surprised. She probably didn't expect to find one so quickly. She stared at Yui while the teacher demanded her to take it off. Fiore immediately turned it off and somehow persuaded the teacher that she shouldn't part with it. Afterwards, she was given her seat which was two desks behind Yui's and the teacher proceeded with homeroom.

_Oh boy, this is going to be a long day. _And he fell back into PFP deprivation depression and despair.

…

Throughout the chemistry lesson in the morning, he constantly felt Fiore's eyes on his back and he wished that she would stop with the staring. It was more attention than he wanted at this stage and it would seem incredibly hard to explain the strange situation. She seemed to be the same age as Elsie though it was hard to tell with the long lives the demons had. The only hope he had was that apparently, they were 'elite' demons and maybe she'd been in lots of strange situations. He suddenly realised something vital.

_I mustn't let Fiore meet up with Elsie and 'myself' yet, otherwise, Yui will know about everything._

On second thoughts, he also didn't want to trust this new demon or let her know about the situation.

_I need to be able to make Fiore trust that Elsie can get the capture done on her own. Pray that they don't know each other or else it'll be impossible to convince Fiore, even if Elsie has already captured 15 spirits..._

So from then on, it turned into a strange observe and don't get caught competition between the two. They were so preoccupied that somehow they'd ended up doing the wrong things at the same time during a practical. To say that the teacher wasn't impressed was an understatement. After all, two work surfaces had become slightly blackened.

"What's with you two?" the chemistry teacher asked, trying to suppress his annoyance with the two students who he had to be careful about, "Can't you just listen to instructions and do the damn practical properly?"

Fiore and 'Yui' glanced at each other and looked to the teacher, "Yes, we'll be careful next time."

_Darn, why did that happen? I'm not supposed to be making an impression even if there already is one from the sensor. This could restrict my freedom of movement even more and it still doesn't affect the meeting between her and 'myself'._

He couldn't help but think negatively, after all, what could he do without his PFP?


	17. Chapter 16: A funny kind of thing

After what seemed like an incredibly long time, it was finally breaktime and Yui was now desperate to find 'the gentleman' and ask about what was going on. After all, she had regained her ability of speech and this was the first chance she had to be able to actually speak to him about it. In her haste, she knocked over tables, chairs and people and when she finally got to the door, crashed straight into 'herself'. As she was about to speak though, the person said: "Let's talk about it on the rooftop." and tried to walk ahead of her.

She decided to take the initiative and grabbed hold of her own arm. He looked genuinely surprised.

"I'm sorry but... I sort of need to go..." Yui said as Elsie pulled alongside her.

"Eh~, I thought you'd already gone this morning." Elsie replied.

She blushed and stayed silent.

…

They ended up having to use the faculty toilets so Elsie had to stand guard outside. She heard some rather amusing things.

"What do you mean you don't know how to use the toilet? You just pee in it and that's it!" Yui's voice shouted angrily.

"B-but I thought men did it differently..." Keima's voice shyly countered.

"For goodness sake, just do it like a woman. There's no flipping difference." Keima answered.

"But I'm going to see _that _when I take the trousers off." Yui said meekly.

"Women as well as men can't do it without taking them off! Stop fretting and just do it, you're wasting time."

Keima heard her crying inside.

"I want to go home. I really don't like this." she sniffed, it was also freaking out Keima a little to hear what he'd be like if he was crying.

"It'll be alright, I'll definitely think of a way back." he promised, holding back the urge to just generally say something tactless.

"I'm so sorry, you're in the same situation but I'm just thinking about myself..." she trailed off.

She realised something: "Umm, I can't really call you 'you' all the time so what's your name?"

"Just call me Yui, It's not like you can call me by my name anyway." he said dismissively.

"I insist." Yui said as she came out, his cheeks slightly red but having conquered the toilet somehow at last.

"Katsuragi Keima." he answered, "I bet you hadn't paid attention to the registration."

Yui ignored this and tried saying his name while she was washing her hands: "Oh, and also, do you join a club?"

"What?" realising that the conversation had somehow changed direction while he... _had _been paying attention.

"When came in this morning, a little girl from the middle school asked me to watch her swim. I promised her to go but I didn't know whether you had club activities or not." she replied.

_Oh yeah, I'd planned that it would happen, I guess I'd forgotten after the swap._

"No, I don't join a club so you can go ahead and watch her." he said. "Can you go back to the classroom? I need to discuss something with Elsie."

"Huh, oh, sure." Yui uttered and obediently walked back.

"Elsie, do you have my PFP?" he knew that the chances of her acting logically for his sake was slim but he needed to ask anyway. He soon found that he was in luck.

"Huh, n... actually, I have the one that you dropped last night in my pocket. Here." she handed it over to him.

"Yes! My salvation is back." he grabbed it from her hands and was disappointed to find that there was only two bars of battery left.

He didn't have any spare batteries either but then he decided to think optimistically.

_At least I have some time for my world of 2D during some of the classes. I didn't think Elsie was going to bring anything anyway so I should consider this a fortunate development._

"Oh, Elsie. I want you to come with me after school, there's something really important that I need you to help me with." he said matter-of-factly.

"What is it?" Elsie queried.

"You'll find out then. For now, just return to class and assis..." he noticed Fiore watching him. She saw that he'd (or in her case 'she'd') noticed her so she stepped out from behind corner.

"You've spotted me." she said casually.

However, Elsie was just staring at her with eyes full of admiration.

"Fio!" Elsie exclaimed, "We haven't seen each other since we graduated."

Fiore scrutinised Elsie for a moment and suddenly, her face softened as she recognised her.

"Aren't you Haqua's friend, umm... Elaine!" she hazarded.

"No," Elsie wore a pained expression, "I'm Elsie."

"Yeah, and you were the number one dunce in the whole class. I remember you." Fiore teased.

"Don't say that..." Elsie moaned.

Meanwhile, Keima watched this exchange uneasily from behind Fiore, where he'd edged to while they were having their reunion.

_She knows Elsie... that means that even if I don't trust her, it'll be hard to get her to stay out of our business._

"So, who's your buddy? I'm interested to see who you've got." Fiore suddenly asked.

Keima froze. He frantically started to gesture at Elsie with as many manner of 'no's to her as possible. Elsie just looked at him blankly without answering Fiore, causing her to turn around. Keima stopped just as she'd completed her turn.

"What is it?" he asked nervously.

"I should be asking you." Fiore replied.

"Why do you think I'm doing anything? Elsie, I'll see you later and ask for answers then, 'kay?" Keima gave Elsie a smile and then walked away.

…

Meanwhile, Yui was walking dejectedly back to her or rather, Keima's classroom.

_Can we really return to normal? What if... what if we stayed like this forever._

She was so absorbed in her train of thought that she didn't notice bumping into a couple of other students.

"Hey, watch where you're walking Katsuragi!" they said indignantly.

Yui finally noticed and she turned towards them, feeling surprised. She stared at them for a while, her mind blanking out. She finally remembered her manners.

"I sincerely apologise for bumping into you." she said while bowing down low, then she continued to walk without any sign of gusto.

The two girls stared after him, one with shock and the other with concern.

"Chihiro, I wonder what's happened. He looks so down and he doesn't have his PFP."

"Ayumi, are you seriously worrying about him?" Chihiro said, "I bet his PFP is the precise reason he's like that." Chihiro observed her closely.

"What are you looking at me like that for?" Ayumi asked apprehensively.

"Don't tell me you... fancy him!" Chihiro teased.

"Wh-what are you talking about?" Ayumi said loudly while blushing.

Chihiro's jaw dropped. "No way, you actually do?"

"Of course not, don't be stupid!" she yelled angrily and walked off in a huff.

…

_Yes, I am finally reunited with my PFP... with only one game._

Still, he liked this game so far so it probably wouldn't be too bad if he needed to replay all the routes again. As much as he'd like to put his whole self into the game, he couldn't help but be incredibly worried about the exchange between Elsie and Fiore. And then there was Yui to think about as well.

_Maybe I should trust Fiore more... I'll ask Elsie about their relationship first before I decide whether she can be trusted or not. As for Yui... I'll just observe as much as I can for now._

He was so stuck between the game and his thoughts that even when he was being shouted at by someone he'd bumped into, his concentration refused to break unless it was in his own time. Which was very soon and he resurfaced to hear someone yelling in Yui's ear. He yelped in surprise.

"Just what the hell is with you?" she said, finally getting his attention.


	18. Chapter 17: A meddling demon

Katsuragi Keima was getting annoyed with the unexpected developments (except when Elsie produced his PFP from her uniform). He knew that events going on outside his control and knowledge was not something he could really predict but having so many clumped into such a short amount of time was really starting to fray at his nerves. But as God of the 2D game world and a man who could operate anywhere with his logic and reason, his tongue did not carelessly betray him so easily. His brain was able to process the situation and act accordingly, all within a split second.

"Wh-what? Who are you?" Keima asked, still shocked from the sudden screaming.

"That doesn't matter. First thing is that you've got a gap in your heart, but it's probably got nothing to do with me. Secondly, do you know where the girl who transferred in today is?"

"What gap are you talking about? I don't have any heart diseases if that's what you're saying." Keima replied in annoyance.

"Just answer the second part and you'll be fine."

"If you're looking for Fiore, then I don't know. Maybe she's following me." Keima replied casually.

Nora gave 'Yui' a dirty look and decided that it was time to get a bit more violent, she grabbed her collar.

"Hey, let go of me!" he shouted in panic, he knew how frightening Nora could be and actually, he did let his guard down for a brief second. He ended up using the masculine term.

"'Me' are you a tomboy or something... no that's not it either so you must actually be a cross-dressing boy!"

"Shut up, how did you get that sort of twisted conclusion? There no way I can be a boy!" he stepped towards her assertively and shouted angrily.

_I can clear this up easily as long as I don't slip up again. That is, if she persists..._

"Whatever, I don't have time to waste with you. I still need to find that girl." Nora stalked off, leaving Keima infinitely relieved.

_Thank God she didn't read my mind, otherwise she'd probably go running off at her mouth with this. It'll be so inconvenient._

After all, who wouldn't want to keep something like this a secret.

…

Yui had been feeling down but now that she was in class, she felt she needed to concentrate on lessons and found herself wondering what Keima would be like during class. Of course, the first meeting she had with Keima was going to make her misunderstand. Even though he'd been rather cold after that, Yui somehow arrived at the conclusion that Keima was a warm and excellent model student. Sure, he had excellent grades but that was about the only thing she got right about him. Upon this thought, she raised her hand to answer the question which the teacher had posed to the class. As she answered it, she was too nervous to notice the expressions of shock that had been plastered onto the face of every pupil in the class. More importantly, the expression that Nikaido-sensei glared at her with. As Yui finished she breathed a sigh of relief.

"How was my answer?" she proceeded to ask.

"Well answered, but..." Nikaido-sensei grabbed her by his hair and slammed his face onto the desk, "Is this some new form of harassment, hmm?"

The whole class was in shock with this treatment that 'he'd' received and watched as his head was yanked up and then the teacher gave up, dropping his head where it slumped on the desk. She walked back to the front of the classroom.

_Did I somehow do something wrong? _She thought in confusion while stars danced around her head.

Elsie watched this event unfold praying that either Yui would go no further or that the teacher would let her off. After all, it was a good answer. There was no such luck.

_Uwah~, I must find kami-nii-sama as soon as possible..._

…

Nora meanwhile, was walking through the corridors invisible to any human's eyes. As district chief, she didn't want to be careless in the face of crisis and get demoted by her superiors for being unhelpful. After all, she was visiting another demon just for her private purposes while she was supposed to be keeping the ex-runaway spirit hosts from behaving out of control and/or finding out about Hell and then spreading it out. Although, Hell would eventually be able to alter those memories, it wouldn't be convenient for everyone whilst Hell could currently do very little about it. Anyway, Nora was getting vexed with the newbie. Sure, she'd already reported to Dokuro and even been able to get into this school but this 'Fiore' person hadn't reported to Nora, the district chief of area 30-2 even though she was a newbie, although she was an elitist and was only going to be here temporarily... Whatever, whoever ignored Nora would be subjected to her cruel punishment and she'd make sure of that.

She went past classroom 2-B whilst 'Keima' had also been on the receiving end of some harsh reality. She was practically glowing with satisfaction seeing Keima like that. She hadn't forgotten about the issues between them two. After a while, she got bored of seeing Keima twitching on the table and decided to continue looking for the newbie. She found her in the next classroom. She also spotted the girl that she'd run into earlier, who was now sitting at her desk still with a PFP in her hands.

_God, that girl is pretty devoted, I wonder what would show up if I read her mind..._

Seeing as she couldn't do anything for now, she called up the spirit assignment board with her hagoromo and found that the girl was the latest host of the spirit for Elsie to capture.

_So this is the one they were talking about yesterday. Well, now I know that it's none of my business._

She thought of it in a jovial way as she was hoping that this time, Elsie was going to fail.

_There's no way a dunce like her can keep up with a pace that even I can't..._

Actually, there was no way for her to be happy about the fact that her subordinate was better than her at capturing souls and she fumed about the 'unfair' things she'd experienced until the bell rang for lunchtime. In short, it was for a very long time and she'd now made a pretty ridiculous decision, supposedly known only to her.

…

Keima got through class well enough. Sure there were a few worried glances his way and he was sure that Fiore had been watching him throughout the lesson but that didn't matter. He noted a click that came from behind him but guessed that it was probably nothing. He had no more distractions and could play his games in peace. However, lunchtime came and he was now only down to the last bar of battery in his PFP which had been serving him so well with his latest captures.

_Oh man, how I hate this cursed reality. Why does the 2D world need the aid of the 3D reality to work, it just doesn't make sense._

As he walked out, he was grabbed by Nora who had been waiting outside into her hagoromo. As she turned him away from her, she saw Fiore running out who immediately spotted them. Nora uttered something inaudible as Keima could no longer hear anything.

_I need to act scared. _

He tried contorting his face until he felt it was suitable but the two demons who had been opening and closing their mouths for a while now turned to him, apparently amused by the way his face had been arranged.

_Crap, I forgot to try a spot of (most probably going to fail) lip-reading. Miming, sure. Lip-reading... as if there is a need for that when I can even just skip the dialogue. Why are they...?_

It looked to Keima as if they'd burst out laughing which looked pretty strange without the sound turned on. Nora appeared to gesture at Fiore to be off and as she turned to go, Keima saw a smile that chilled even him to the bone.

_Whether Elsie trusts her or not, I'll be content on doing this on my own without her help._

He noted the strange appearance of hagoromo strands coming across her eyes. For a moment, he was slightly perplexed but suddenly, he realised the implications of this. He frantically tried to look up and to his dismay, it did seem like Nora was getting ready for a bit of mind reading.

He struggled to break free.

_Oh my bloo..._


	19. Chapter 18: A mind game

Yui breathed a sigh of relief when the lunch bell finally came. She was still suffering from the bruise from his head and she decided it would be nice to head out and take a breath of fresh air. Elsie joined her at the door. She was about to say something when they heard something going on down the corridor. Although Elsie suddenly looked shocked and went to investigate, all Yui could see was a couple of other people who had the same scarf thing as Elsie laughing about something. She didn't look down as a person bashed into her from behind. She turned to see who it was and found a girl standing there, shyly looking at her feet with two bentos in her hand.

"I-I-I'm sorry I w-wasn't able to h-h-help yesterday." she burst out, "You said you kept on forgetting to bring lunch so umm, if you don't mind..." she flushed bright red.

_I need to be like Keima..._

During Yui's pause, the girl had got her lines in, "If you don't mind, please eat with me!"

In her nervousness, she ended up shouting them and the whole class heard. Yui now found herself in a bit of a sticky situation. In the corner, she could see some classmates silently cheering for the girl.

"Y-yeah, sure." there was no way she could reject this girl and Keima wouldn't do that either, right?

…

"Nora!" Elsie called out as she saw Yui's body struggling from the hagoromo wrapped around her head, "What are you doing here? Aren't you supposed to be with your buddy?"

"Hmm." Nora turned around to face her, "I'm going to see everything that's in her head and you can't stop me."

"But what are you doing that for?" Elsie asked desperately, everyone walked past as if nothing was happening, after all Nora and Elsie were invisible and unheard to humans.

Elsie's intervention had served to buy Keima a little time to think. However and if she had to read his mind, he doubted that she actually meant 'everything'. So he needed to think of the things for the right categories based on what he knew of Yui. He wondered whether the fact that this was actually Yui's brain would be any help but he hoped it would somehow help in some way. Elsie had failed to convince Nora but that was expected and he braced himself for some serious concentration.

"Prepared to be read like a book by me." Nora said to him even though she'd made sure that he wouldn't hear anything.

_Prepare to be resisted. _Keima thought and started to click on the turned off PFP that was in his hands.

_Turning on my 'Virtual PFP'... damn it, hurry up and load._

He slipped into the state in which Nora had initially found him.

…

Tsukiyo was having lunch in the classroom with Luna and didn't really expect much to happen. It was going to be like every other lunchtime. Eat, rooftop, come back down for classes if she was bothered. Deep down though, her secret desire was to see the strange man again and ask him questions which she wanted the answers to. She sighed and noticed something out of the corner of her eye. She turned to look but she didn't find anything there.

_Must be my imagination._

She continued to eat. But the strange feeling that there was something going on in front of her wouldn't go away so she decided that she would try to 'catch it by surprise'.

It worked in a way but it was only a very brief glimpse. It was something like a distorted image and there was something about this split-second image that reminded her of the strange man she'd met with two days ago.

_Why do I keep thinking of him? For goodness sake, pull yourself together._

…

Yui and the girl who introduced herself as Yoshino Asami sat down under the shade of the trees beside the school sports grounds.

"Here, it's the bento I made for you..." she spoke quietly, unused to really speaking at all, let alone with the one she fancied.

Yui accepted the bento and took a cautious bite. Asami stared intensely at 'Keima' hoping that 'he' liked it. Keima's eyes widened.

"Yoshino-san, this is absolutely delicious! It's been made by you right?" Yui commented.

Asami's face glowed with happiness and she nodded but Yui was already thinking about other things, about herself.

_I want to eat a homemade bento as well. I want a heartfelt one that's been made for me._

Keima's eyes welled up and let the tears fall, Yui had completely forgotten about being Keima. Asami was shocked by this reaction.

"Ka-katsuragi-kun, wh-what's the matter?" Asami asked concerned as to whether she'd done something terribly wrong. She did not know him well but knew that it must be rare to cry. At least, that was the assumption that she'd made.

"I'm so sorry," Yui sobbed, "I-I'm just so happy about this bento I..." she trailed off.

"Well, make sure you eat it all then." Asami said gently.

Yui nodded and the bento was emptied, during which they talked about well... nothing in general. For Asami though, it was a great accomplishment and she swore that she would make more progress next time. She did note 'his' strange behaviour in class today but implications of this change were not known to her so therefore, that was how she viewed it. They decided that this was enough for now and Asami took the boxes and walked off after saying goodbye.

Yui sat there for a moment thinking about what happened between her and Asami and realised that she had forgotten about 'being Keima'.

_I'm so careless, what should I do now._

She got up and decided to look for Keima and ask more about him.

_I wonder if there are any of his friends that I should be interacting with, maybe they're feeling left out right now._

She started to make her way back to the high school building.

…

_What do I think about first? Maybe... Yui's mother. _

Suddenly he felt a strange sensation like his mind was being forcibly pulled away.

_Oh no you don't. _

He didn't realise how strong it was and he felt his conjured image being morphed, merged and separated while whatever she was trying to find out kept flashing in and out. It was hard to imagine that he would struggle at anything. He suppressed the urge to think about the other captured girls and even Yokkyun floated by at some point.

_Dammit. _Then everything went black.

…

For the demons, the things they were seeing were slightly different. After all, the screen could only be so big so a mess of randomness and confusion was seen. After a few minutes of battling, Nora finally found what she was looking for. After a brief blackout, the image of Yui's family and house were seen. Nora wondered about this for a moment.

"So do I have to kill these people or something?" she asked pensively.

*click*

"Nora you can't do that!" Elsie cried, "It's certainly not going to..." she watched Nora stumble a little and lean on the wall for support. Yui's body slid to the floor, unconscious.

A sliver of a black tendril escaped from her, unbeknownst to anyone.

She looked at Elsie for a moment.

"Damn, that shouldn't have happened."

"What?" Elsie asked.

"Never mind." she scratched her head, "Can you keep this a secret?"

As Nora and Elsie continued to talk, Fiore slipped away to get lunch from the canteen.

_Well, I've probably found out enough for today._

* * *

><p>It's starting to get harder to piece the bits together so if I start slacking, please be patient<em>. <em>Anyway, the girls are starting to come back into the story. I'm sorry if the Yui+demons business has been going on for quite a bit, if there anything you're not happy with - well, you know what to do._  
><em>


	20. Chapter 19: A 'strategic' conversation

The route back to the high school building led Yui past the library and that was where the second of the events took place. Obviously, it would be with the librarian, Shiomiya Shiori.

"Umm." she shyly let out as Yui walked past the library entrance.

"Ano*!" she uttered more loudly.

Yui stopped, looked at her and pointed to herself questioningly. She nodded.

"What is it?" Yui finally asked, maybe a little reluctantly.

Shiori sensed it, "Are you in a hurry?" she asked falteringly even though she was afraid to be rejected.

"Well, yes but..." Yui was once again stuck in a situation where she didn't know what to do. It seemed to be happening far too much in a day.

"Maybe you could come after school?" she asked looking pleadingly up at 'Keima'.

"I'm sorry, but I..." Yui thought about it for a bit, "I know, how about you come with me to the swimming pool. I'm watching someone there swim so we could talk there."

"But my story..." she uttered.

"You shouldn't keep yourself in the library so much. You need to relax every now and then." Yui said, feeling her confidence rising.

Shiori thought about it for a bit, "But I really can't..."

"I'm sorry...well, I'll see you later when I'm not so busy. Deal?" Yui said.

Shiori nodded and then retreated back into the library.

_I need to know even more about Katsuragi now, I mean... if I don't recognise the people who he's friends with and can't say their names, our cover would be blown rather quickly._

Yui paused again, wondering why she seemed to be dropping the posh dialect and politeness which she had used for so long.

…

Keima woke up to find that the first thing he saw was himself. He pushed Yui away by his shoulder and sat up, trying to make sense of the situation.

_Argh, my head hurts like hell._

"Keima-sama, what's happened while I was away? Why have you collapsed?" Yui asked desperately.

"Elsie, what happened?" he asked the demon who was standing behind Yui.

Elsie looked uneasily between Keima and Yui. "Erm..."

"Katsuragi, I know this seems to be a little rude but could you go outside for a moment?" Keima said.

"Katsuragi?" Yui asked.

"Oh, and please stop calling me 'Keima-sama', I want to keep this as discreet as possible."

"Okay..." and she walked out of the infirmary.

"Well?"

"You passed out while your mind was read by Nora, but it didn't come up with your memories, why?" Elsie asked.

He processed this information which triggered him to remember rather fuzzily that he was tackled down.

"Maybe it was because it was Yui's brain, but I don't remember Nora trying to read my mind. Did Hell do something?"

"I'm sure it was just the shock." even Elsie was slightly unconvinced. After all, he was the Capturing_ God. _

While he pondered about this he told Elsie to get Yui back in.

"Kei- I mean Goido-san, I don't know whether I'm supposed to know any of your friends. I mean, there was the girl this morning, a girl who offered me lunch called Yoshino Asami and then there was another girl from the library." She suddenly noticed the correlation.

"They're all girls." she said simply.

"That doesn't matter. The only name you really need to know is the first one; I call her Minami-chan. As for the librarian... you can find out her name yourself and call me Yui. I find it more comfortable that way." he turned to Elsie, "If you ever meet up with Fuse, tell Yui who she is but do everything to keep away from her. I don't want to meet her in this situation, she is a genius after all."

He sighed, things were starting to get out of hand already but he didn't feel like he cared. But he knew he had to try but this 'forcing himself to do it' was making him feel more tired than it usually did.

"Katsuragi, I want you to avoid Fuse Aoba as much as you can. What's your e-mail address?"

"Huh? Why?" Yui asked confused at this sudden request.

"I need to send you the script for what you say when you encounter her tonight." he said.

"It's ... (couldn't type one)" she answered, still confused as to what he was talking about.

"Good, that's all I need to-"

At that moment, Yui's mother busted into the infirmary. She saw 'Keima' at her daughter's bedside and slapped 'him' away.

"What is that filthy insect doing near you?" she shouted then proceeded to pummel inaudible things to all the people who was unfortunately in the room.

"You'd better go back, we're fortunate for being able to finish our conversation before she interrupted and Katsuragi, try doing many other things while you have the opportunity." Keima told her, "Now go."

As Yui ran out of the infirmary and he was left with her mother who was still ranting.

"Mother, I'm alright..." he stopped as he realised that she was back into her habit of not listening.

_Well, I guess I should leave her to it._

He slipped out of bed and walked out.

…

Fortunately, Keima was able to convince Yui's mother that he should stay in school after she'd caused some amount of commotion in the middle of class which he'd returned to. So he was able to last until the end of school without being dragged home. As soon as the final bell of the day rang, he ran straight to Elsie and told her that there was a very important mission which she needed to accompany him.

"Elsie, cloak me in your hagoromo and we're going to the game shop near Inazumart." he commanded as he swept into the classroom, not breathless in any way at all.

"What about band practice and why a game shop?" Elsie said disapprovingly, knowing what his blatant intentions were.

"I'm going there to buy some games." he said shortly.

Elsie sighed at this blunt answer and went along with it. He had been able to capture many spirits while he still played games and she didn't want to deprive him of them if it meant he might not be able to focus. After all, this was a rather unique case.

"Let me tell Chihiro that I won't be in band practice first." and she skipped away.

* * *

><p>It's short and uneventful again please forgive me...<p> 


	21. Chapter 20: A change in freedom

Yui also made it to end of the day without anymore encounters during the rest of lunch or afternoon break where she stayed adamantly in the classroom... well, she ended up helping a few people who were complaining about the homework they'd got today (and being ignorant about their initial rejection while she had, again, been lost deep in thought about the situation, trying to remember everything that Keima had been saying).

_Right, off to the swimming pool now._

She'd marched away before Keima had come into the classroom so she had once again, missed one of those conversations which he was infamously degraded for. She arrived at the entrance of the sports centre and found that Shiori had already been waiting there.

"Have you changed your mind?" Yui asked.

Shiori ignored that, shoving a notebook into Yui's arms, "Please read this." and she ran off, back to the direction of the library.

_What's this, I guess I'll read it while I'm watching Minami._

She trotted into the sports centre, holding onto the precious notebook.

…

Keima was now at the game shop with Elsie goggling at the galges shelf. It was what Keima's mum would call 'making an idiotic face' although the difference now was that it was worn on Yui's face.

"I haven't seen games in what seems like eons, this is my salvation." he cried while he scooped armfuls of games from the shelves regardless of what they were as long as it was on the 'galges' shelf.

"Kami-nii-sama, what about living as Yui? You know she doesn't play games." Elsie said with exasperation.

"You should know better than to think that they are mere games, they are also props to reset the relationship between Yui and her mother." Keima delivered an excuse that seemed only feasible to him and understood by no-one but himself.

Elsie decided that it was useless to argue with him so agreed to assist him with his so-called 'buying props' business. Strangely enough, it didn't last long as Yui's mother somehow found her way to the game shop.

"Yui! What are you doing in such a suspicious place?" Yui's mother cried in shock.

_What? Does that mother have some tracking device on me or something?_

Of course, he knew there wasn't one on him but it seemed unreal as to how she was able to find him so quickly in a place that Yui most certainly couldn't have been to before.

"Oh mother, I sort of needed to erm... buy some galge." he smiled brightly at her trying to get on her good side. Not that it worked.

"Nonsense. You have no time for these, you must train to be a regal woman." snatching the stack of games from him.

Without thinking (even though it was most definitely a good strategy), Keima started a tantrum that he must buy his games. It was hard to blame him; he hadn't even seen a game (except the one he had with him) since he became a girl and that was definitely what you'd call stressful and possibly life-changing event. For Yui's mother though, seeing a seventeen year old girl having a tantrum on the floor would definitely have earned a disapproving look from her. So never in her entire life had she thought that her beloved daughter would do such a thing.

"Yu-Yui... what's wrong?" her mother asked, embarrassed and worried while she threw the games roughly where the shelves were. It sent most of them clattering to the floor.

"I. Want. My. Games!" Keima dictated clearly and forcefully to her while watching in horror at what was happening to his stack of 'carefully' selected games.

"Oh dear Yui, you must be a little ill. I'll cancel all of your lessons and make sure you have lots of rest. This place is making you act weird." she said while struggling to pull her daughter away.

Keima saw no other way than to trust Elsie with this important mission which was something he would never do unless it was a full scale emergency which it was... to him. He threw a stash of money at Elsie.

"Elsie, take this and buy the games, I also want you to bring all my game consoles and monitors from home you should be able to do it with your hagoromo. Just don't break anything!" Yui's voice faded as he was dragged away into a posh car.

Although it was a task that Elsie should disapprove of, she couldn't help but think that it was absolutely wonderful that she was actually being entrusted an important task by Keima. She vowed to get it absolutely right and started by picking up the games that were scattered on the floor.

...

Yui went straight to the swimming pool and sat down at the spectator stands.

_I'm supposed to call her Minami-chan right?_

As she waited for her to come out she decided that it would be a good idea to read the notebook that the librarian had given her. She looked at the cover and although there wasn't a title, she saw a name which had been scrawled onto the corner of the cover.

_Shiomiya Shiori, that's a nice name._

She opened the book and began to read. She quickly established that it was a sci-fi and that the main character had a unique name 'Simone S. Libro'but hadn't read much when she spotted a little girl waving at her. She recognised it as the girl from this morning and so, waved back at her. The girl beamed a radiant smile up at her and then looked over the pool with an impatient face, doing everything to hold herself back from diving into the glittering pool.

_She looks like such a nice little girl, she looks so happy, so free._

The time passed quickly for them while Yui cheered for Minami. Yui enjoyed seeing such a perfect spectacle, even though Minami was not the fastest of swimmers, it was obvious to everyone how much she enjoyed it and loved every second of it.

_Ah~, Minami-chan is such a wonderful person... compared to me I'm useless._

She forced herself to shake of those thoughts.

_If I ever get back, I will definitely tell mother to stop forcing me to do things I don't want to, but it's impossible..._

She decided that the solution was to enjoy as much as she could the time she spent as Keima. She bid Minami a brief farewell and left the sports centre, welcoming the breeze which seemed to blow all her worries away.


	22. Chapter 21: A disaster or not

As soon as Keima got 'home', he was ushered straight to Yui's room and told to rest. Of course, that's what he did while he waited for the arrival of his delivery which was worryingly being delivered by what must be the ditziest person (well, demon) in the whole world. He prayed with his whole being that everything was safe.

_When I think about it, that was not the best of things to do... but there seems to be no other choice._

He thought about irrelevant things for a while until he decided to snap out of it and think about the scenarios for Fuse. He sat there for half an hour until Elsie finally flew through the window with more things than even a weightlifter could even inch off the floor with. Funnily enough, it did not look as much of a spectacle as Keima had initially expected. Unfortunately, this was Elsie and as expected there was always a slight snag to the whole thing. Lets say that she didn't deposit them onto the floor with nearly as much care as she carried them when she saw Keima.

"Kami-nii-sama! Here's your-" Elsie was interrupted by a huge clattering of plastic and bits of glass as the items of Keima's interests were dropped abruptly onto the floor.

"Argh! What have you done?" Keima screamed, unable to hold back his pent up anger.

"Oh my, I'm so sorry." Elsie sighed still slightly fazed by the sudden noise which she genuinely didn't expect, "I wanted to do this right as well..." she thought aloud.

They heard running footsteps coming closer. Keima had to rein in his temper and consider what he should do when that woman charged in.

"Elsie, use your hagoromo to hide all of my stuff." he spoke seriously watching Elsie still looking at the pile of things being dazed, "Quickly!"

Wordlessly, Elsie started to work her (limited) skill with the hagoromo over the games and consoles.

_It's one thing to burst in seeing a pile of wrecked things in the room and another to find them all set up and running. That bugged demon gives me no end of problems even when the situation supposedly can't get any worse._

Yui's mother burst in as Elsie had finished her job and dived under the bed as there wasn't enough hagoromo to cover herself as well.

"Yui! What's happened?" her mother's voice resounded out from the from behind big burly men in black who'd sent Keima sprawling away as he'd also got to the Japanese sliding doors.

Fortunately, he was sprawled away from the pile of his stuff and Yui's mother was the only one to come into the room anyway. It seems that they weren't going to pull out the bulldozers then. Keima groaned from the impact as Yui's mother tried to hold him up. He shook her violently off and struggled to stand up on his own.

"Seriously mother, I'm alright. You don't need to worry about me." he gasped still a little dizzy.

"But you look horrible. We must get you a doctor at once." she shrieked.

"I'll get better if you just get out the room and leave me to rest!" he commanded forcefully.

Yui's mother was so shocked at this sudden change in attitude from her beloved daughter, she wordlessly complied without even asking about the noise again.

_What is happening to my daughter?_

Within seconds the room was peaceful again. Keima turned around to see his pile of games.

_Even without these, I'm still doing pretty well with Yui's mother. Anyway, not the time to be thinking of that, I need to see what I can salvage._

After another half an hour, his games and consoles that survived were set up in order and he made a mental tally of how much damage there was.

_Right, damage count is: a Cream cast, 4 Y Boxes, all except one Wii (thing), 2 DSes, 5 PFPs, 3 GBAs, an Atari Jaguar, the only Odyssey 200, the only Atari 2600, 2 monitors and 17 games._

In short, a disaster.

He was irritated to no end but as Elsie had already fled, there was nobody to shout about it to and besides, he had to quickly get on with his games. He quickly booted them all up and got down to work about typing up what Yui should do on her next meeting with Fuse and also played his games on the side. He decided to use God mode for this to speed up the typing and set even more time aside for his games. This went on for quite a while...

…

Yui was walking with Keima's rucksack slung over her shoulder and decided that since she hadn't had the chance to read the notebook that Shiori had given her, she might as well read it now. She unzipped the bag and to her dismay she found that it was not inside.

_Ack, I must have left it back at the swimming pool._

She turned back to the school and started to run and then remembered the hard way that this body couldn't handle any amount of 'strenuous' exercise and slowed back down. That hadn't been a lot of help either since she still arrived at the school panting for more air.

_Finally... made it..._

She strode towards the sports centre and arrived at the swimming pool where she found that even though the club had ended, Minami hadn't left yet. She wasn't swimming but she wore an expression of calm and contentedness. She drifted on the surface, feeling the smoothness of the water as the light ripples lapped over her. Yui decided that she wouldn't disturb Minami but it seemed that she had already been noticed as Minami's voice reached her.

"You walk really funny up the stairs, you know that?" Minami smiled up at 'Keima'.

"I guess..." Yui answered uncertainly turning around.

_I guess I really am not accustomed to this body yet._

"What did you come back for?" Minami asked hauling herself out of the water.

"Oh, I left a notebook here." she picked it up and waved it a little to prove her point.

Minami went silent, reminiscing about the past while Yui looked at her with a bemused face.

"Umm, what's wrong?" Yui asked.

Minami ignored the question and proceeded to talk about what she was thinking of.

"Katsuragi-senpai, I remember that the first time we met was similar to what was happening now. I'd forgotten my swimming goggles and when I came back to get them, you were here, swimming the most magnificent, beautiful strokes that I had ever seen." then she was lost in thought.

_Was Keima-sama really good at swimming? As far as I can tell, this body won't even run 100 metres to save its life. Or maybe that's my problem about adapting to this._

She thought again about how this life was so alien to her original one but she started to not care about going back. After all, it had been rather exciting and she felt as if she was having so much fun._  
><em>

While she was thinking this, she had been walking down the steps and she misjudged the steps which sent her flying down sprawling onto the hard tiled floor.

"Ah. Katsuragi-senpai, are you alright?" Minami snapped out of her reverie and assisted 'him' to stand up.

"Oww..." Yui rubbed his arms and knees where it was most painful, it surprised her when Minami suddenly cried out.

"What's the matter?" Yui asked and saw the cause for her shock when she looked up over the swimming pool.

Minami immediately dived into the pool but she wasn't able to save it as she came out and all that was left was a soggy mass of pages.

"I'm sorry I couldn't get to it quickly enough." she apologised.

"No, don't worry about it. You already did your best to save it didn't you?" Yui reassured her, "Anyway, you should go home now, it's getting late." quickly changing the subject.

Minami was dejectedly walked to the changing rooms and Yui just didn't want to leave her like that.

"Umm, Minami-chan!" she called, "If you don't mind, maybe I should read you the completed story when it's done."

"You're writing a story?" Minami asked.

"I'll be helping my friend with it." Yui answered.

"And I'll be looking forward to it." came a slightly more perked reply.


	23. Chapter 22: A normal family?

It was quarter to six and Minami had left for home after Yui told her that it was better to get some rest. Now, Yui was reluctantly trudging to the library and at the same time as she wanted to meet and apologise to Shiori about what she'd done to her notebook, she was also hoping that she had already gone home so that she could leave it for a little longer and maybe ask Keima-sama about how to deal with it. Not that she wanted to do that either in case he got mad at her for being so careless.

_Are those automatic doors going to open? _She thought as she hesitated a little distance away from the doors.

_Here goes. _Yui took a deep breath and stepped forward. The doors opened. She went in with a heavy heart.

She headed for the librarian's post and found that Shiori was sitting there reading a book even though it was past closing time.

"Umm..." the nervous sound reverberated in the almost silent library and Shiori looked up.

"Ah, Kei- Katsuragi-kun." she stuttered to 'him' while she instinctively covered her face with the book she was reading.

"Ahahaha, Shiomiya-san... umm, how do I explain this..." Yui really did not want to break the news.

"What's the matter?" Shiori asked as she practically tore the book from her face and set it on the table. That was when she noticed the crinkly looking book in 'Keima's' hand.

"What's that?"

Yui had to come clean now, she took a deep breath.

"I'm so sorry! I was being careless and I accidentally dropped your book in the swimming pool. I tried to dry it under the hand dryer but the ink had already run, I'm so sorry!" she stammered this while she bowed sincerely to Shiori who was actually more shocked at 'him' bowing at her than anything else.

"Katsuragi-kun, please don't be like this, it's alright." Shiori stammered back, not that she felt it was alright but she was nervous and wanted to break the tension.

"I'm really sorry but maybe I could help you with your novel. We could work together on it and maybe you'll be able get your ideas more easily." Yui said this hopefully.

She was slightly perturbed by the reaction that she received from Shiori as the girl suddenly turned bright red and let her head fall onto the desk in front of her which made a worryingly loud bang, though it could've been because of the library. Yui watched speechless for a moment wondering what she could do or say to improve the situation than worsen it as had been happening around her since she became Keima. Before she could think of anything though, Shiori abruptly stood up and walked stiffly towards her. She stopped, hesitating for a moment and then snatched the crumpled notebook from his hand. Yui blinked.

"Umm." her cheeks still warm, "It would be the utmost pleasure for your majesty to aid me with my work." when she finally registered what she said she turned into such a hue of red that it would probably be impossible to get any redder.

"Ah! I-i-ignore what I s-s-said!" she said rather loudly while unable to hold back the urge to hit Keima's head with the remains of the tattered notebook.

"E-excuse me!" Yui said quickly as she felt that the situation might be going slightly out of hand "I'll take my leave." and she hurriedly left, leaving Shiori rather lost.

…

The library was silent once more as the automatic doors closed behind the one called Katsuragi Keima.  
><em>Why do I only get so nervous around him? What happened to cause this? I'm certain he is the answer to my questions but what's so special about him?<em>  
>Suddenly, she seemed to catch something at the corner of her eye. She turned to it and found nothing there. Even so it seemed to remind her of something although she had no idea what. After pursuing a thought fruitlessly, she decided that she should finish up in the library. She looked at the crumpled notebook in her hand.<em><br>Maybe this isn't so bad. Maybe Lady Luck has reached her hand out to me. Maybe this is the start of something I don't know._

…

When Yui finally made it to what was now her home.

"I'm home." she said while feeling a warm, little tingle.

_I've never really needed to say it before, it feels so satisfying._

"Welcome home!" Elsie greeted cheerfully, "Where have you been? Well never mind, it's almost dinner so you should help set up the table."

"Yeah sure." Yui replied happily.

_I'm getting to live with a normal family, this is so exciting!_

She helped Elsie who showed her how to set the table up. It was quick work as Elsie was a genius when it came to house chores.

"Now, that's that done!" Elsie grinned cheerfully at Yui, "Maybe nii-sama has sent you that email by now, you should go check." she said, maybe slightly sheepishly.

"Oh yeah, I almost forgot." Yui laughed nervously.

_It would be terrible if I forgot._

"Where's the computer then?" she asked Elsie.

"..."

"What's wrong?" Yui asked Elsie who had suddenly gone silent, the outburst that came out was so sudden that Yui jumped back.

"Awah! I completely screwed up again. I took everything to Yui's place. Oh no, what should I do?" Elsie cried.

Mari heard Elsie as she was just coming out of the kitchen.

"Hmm, what's happened Elsie?" Mari said as she set a couple of dishes on the table.

"Yu- nii-san needs to use the computer, is there any others apart from the ones that were in his room?" of course this sounded like a very strange question to Mari.

"No, after you washed our family computer, we haven't replaced it yet. Besides," she turned to Keima disapprovingly, "can't you just use your own? You've got loads."

_Elsie _washed_ a computer?_

Yui was completely baffled by the conversation, she didn't have the faintest clue as to what she could possibly respond with as she did not know the way this household worked.

"Huh?" she just said, her eyes flicked to Elsie who looked as if she was about to cry.

"Wh-what's wrong?" she asked Elsie cautiously, "Did I do something wrong?"

"Wah! I'm so sorry, I just screw up every time. There isn't a computer in the house anymore." she cried.

"Uh... let's have dinner for now, I'm sure you'll feel better after that." Yui said desperately, wondering whether everyone's normal lives were this hectic even though they didn't have to do the training.

"Yes, let's." Mari contributed while she gave 'Keima' a questioning look.

_Since when has he become so considerate._

…

After realising that it wasn't possible to use 'God mode' in Yui's body without getting cramp every few minutes, he'd resorted to making his detailed scripts without using it.

_This is so troublesome... at least the power output in this house is also really good. It's a pity I don't have more screens, I could go through so many more routes.  
><em>

While not being able to use 'God mode' slowed him down, it did give him more thinking space and he realised that he was supposed to have done something about Asami today and he'd completely forgotten again.

_Is Yui a really forgetful person or something, I keep forgetting my plans and actually I wasn't even bothered about the situation when I was in the bath last night... is this maybe the influence of the runaway spirit instead?_

He shook his head and started typing more things than just the the next meeting with Fuse (which lasted for about nineteen pages) like where she shouldn't go to at certain times of the week, what to do in an emergency situation and more importantly, the few lines he wanted Yui to say to Asami before the chance slipped away. Of course, bearing in mind that he didn't want to limit Yui's actions too much so that she felt restricted. Still, Fuse's meeting was pretty much the only one he didn't want to mess up.

"Yui! It's time for dinner." the mother poked her head into the room and was baffled by the sight she was met with.

"Coming!" Keima yelled unnecessarily as he checked through the content lightening fast then attached and sent it to Yui's email.

"Let's go mother. We mustn't keep everyone waiting." he pushed her out and as he did one last check of the room.

He found something which also baffled him. He remembered his count of everything and found that it was the right number... including the two computers.

_Oh yeah, Elsie brought everything didn't she..._ He tried to think about it properly and when he came to a conclusion, he was definitely not happy.

"That Elsie." he grumbled, "Why does she have to make everything so hard for me?"

"Did you say something?" Yui's mother didn't hear what he said but was surprised by the angry tone in 'her' voice.

"Oh nothing," he forced a intentionally fake smile at Yui's mother, "just thinking aloud..."

_...about what to do with Elsie next time I see her._

* * *

><p>Yui was surprised. Just now, Elsie had been crying a puddle of tears and now, she and her mother were eating dinner as if nothing had happened. It made her wonder whether she'd been hallucinating the past few minutes. They were having some family small talk and it seemed as if Mari wasn't very concerned that she wasn't really contributing a lot. She had been zoning out.<p>

"Keima, why are you not eating?" Mari gave him a smile that Keima might have shied away from but for Yui, she did not comprehend its real meaning and she just answered.

"Oh sorry, I was daydreaming." she picked up Keima's chopsticks and ate some of the boiled squid that was set in the middle of the table.

_Usually, we eat the food that's been set in front of...th-this is delicious!_

She proceeded to voice her thoughts to Keima's mum.

"I've never eaten something as good as this before..."

For a moment Mari was shocked that her son would compliment like this at all and then her face changed as she apparently took it the wrong way.

"Are you saying that everything that you've eaten before is absolutely rubbish? Huh?" she shot Yui a menacing look which rendered Yui trying to find something else to say in a flustered fashion.

"N-n-no. You've misunderstood... I-I-I mean everything you make is great it-it-it..." she trailed off as she realised she had no idea what to say without making her even angrier. Elsie finally piped in to defend her.

"Ah, I'm sure nii-sama sincerely meant that your cooking is great. Anyway, we shouldn't fight at the dinner table."

As Mari's temper subsided, Yui breathed a sigh of relief. Even though she was trying to be like Keima (or at least who she thought he was) it seemed that everything that she was doing had the wrong effect.

_I need to do my best to be like Keima but what is he really like?_

She spend the rest of dinner savouring every mouthful and because of that, finishing last. Of course Mari had been watching Keima after that and becoming more and more confused at his actions.

_Wouldn't he usually try to eat as quickly as possible so that he can play on his games... in fact, what's with that face that seems to be shining from happiness, it's weird._

Since Yui was the last to finish, she was told to wash the dishes. That didn't go very well. It seemed that Yui had really not done this sort of thing before and after a few of them were reduced to useless bits of sharp crockery, Mari released her wrath on 'him'. Elsie watched this in despair when the phone started ringing.

"I'll go get the phone!" Elsie called and went into the next room to pick up the phone.

"This is the Katsuragi household, who is it?"

"Elsie you stupid demon! How is Yui supposed to receive any email if there's no computer?" Yui's voice punctuated through the phone sharply but not so loudly that Elsie had to hold the phone away from her ear, which was strange. Elsie was dismissive about such details though and answered back normally.

"Ah, Kami-nii-sama! How are you doing at the moment? Yui's really struggling to act like you."

"That's not the point, the point is that you need to come here right now. Anyway, I need to go now because they're looking for me since I just suddenly disappeared before dinner. *Yui, who are you talking t-*" he hung up on her.

_What is Kami-nii-sama doing over there?_

She went back to find that the situation had diffused with one person with her hair down but looking confused and the other looking scared out of her wits on the verge of tears.

Mari turned to her.

"Elsie, do you think there something a bit different about Keima today?"

Meanwhile, 'Keima' had jumped up and ran towards Elsie hugging her. Elsie blushed at this sudden action and Mari's jaws had dropped open at the action that 'Keima' had taken.

"I didn't know she was this scary! Help me!" Yui cried it seemed as if she was the only one left moving in the room.

It only finally started to move when Mari dropped to the floor in apparent shock and Elsie tore away from Yui with unsteady steps.

"Uwah... Yui you shouldn't do that. Mum, are you okay?" she stumbled towards Mari.

"I'm so sorry. Everything I do seems to be completely wrong. I want to act like Keima but I really don't know what he's like."

"Ahahaha, you should go up and take a bath now, you're tired today. We'll discuss more on this later." Elsie then ushered Yui upstairs leaving Mari on the sofa.

"Oh yeah, Elsie, do you have something I could use as a blindfold?"

Seemingly out of nowhere, Elsie produced a white cloth and gave it to her.

"I'll set the bath up first, you can have a rest in nii-san's room." and she left Yui to it.

As Yui went into the room, she was surprised.

_What happened to all the things that were in here this morning?_

She recalled the conversation before dinner but it still didn't make a lot of sense. She sighed, giving up making sense of anything and had a nap.

…

After Elsie had got the water at the right temperature, she went to Keima's room to find that Yui was asleep already.

_I guess I'll wake her up later._

She went downstairs and told Mari that she should use the bath first and that she'd be going out for a while.

"Take care and don't come back too late." Mari smiled at her and went upstairs to take a bath, it seemed that she had recovered.

About ten minutes later, Elsie had infiltrated into the Goido mansion and was in her hagoromo, lost.

_Why is this mansion so big? I won't be able to find Kami-nii-sama like this. I wonder how I found it last time..._

Nonetheless, she continued to navigate her way through the rooms and then remembered that she had got in through the window from outside. But it turned out that getting back outside was also a task that Elsie found immensely difficult. Luckily, it seemed that she finally found the room some time later when she heard some very familiar gaming sounds coming from one of the rooms she was walking past.

"Kami-nii-sama, you called for me!" Elsie said happily.

The girl that was sitting there playing galge on six different TV screens and probably a few other hand-held consoles stopped his relentless attack and slowly turned to face the demon. Her face showed that of utmost displeasure.

"You're late!" he shouted, ignoring the fact that it could be heard by anyone else nearby, "What took you so frickin' long?"

"Yui can't get into character, she doesn't even know what you're like." Elsie explained worriedly, "Anyway, things are relatively fine at the moment."

"I see... well, the immediate problem right now is that there isn't a computer at home so take one home right now. Don't break it." he picked up a PFP and a charger from the floor, "Take this to her as well, it's in case you mess up. That's all." just like that, he turned back to his games.

"Is that it?" Elsie asked, slightly taken aback by the fact that he wasn't conversing properly as her partner or making any of his analytical speeches.

He grunted in reply but other than that there was no other indication to tell that he had heard.

_He's strange today, I wonder what's got into him._

She flew out with the computer in tow and the PFP in her pocket.

…

_God I hate reality. Why does the swap have to be triggered during _that _time for girls. A normal galge doesn't even touch upon that subject..._ Keima thought irritably as he tapped the controllers with renewed passion.

_Damn, I will never succumb to reality!_


	24. Chapter 23: A few assumptions

When Elsie finally returned with the items, she flew in through the window taking care not to wake Yui before she'd got the computer all plugged in (of course, with the help of her hagoromo's ability to put everything back in the right place). She then shook Yui awake.

"Yui, you should take a bath." Elsie said gently.

Yui groaned and his eyelids fluttered open.

"Hmm, Elsie." she shook herself awake and noticed the computer, "Why does this room keep changing every time I see it?" she rubbed his eyes.

"Ah, there's a computer!" she jumped out of bed and booted it up.

"Umm, Yui. What about the bath?" Elsie asked.

"I want to see what Keima-sama has sent me first, please." Yui pleaded.

"Fine," Elsie sighed, "I'll go first then." and went out.

_I wonder what he's sent._

The internet was fast and not long later she was reading through the email. The email itself wasn't very long but just told her to read the attachment as soon as possible so she did. That was when her eyes widened in shock and prompted her to wonder even more about what this man was.

_He couldn't have had a lot of time to do all of this and what... 23 pages? How am I supposed to read _and _memorise all of this? I mean, this is a script for goodness sake!_

Nevertheless, she started to read and she realised that it wasn't just one detailed script, it was many elaborate scenarios for every possibility... and 19 pages had been dedicated to Fuse Aoba and were only for the next meeting. That had taken her about half an hour to go through and she was beginning to wonder what Keima was expecting from her, whether she was expected to remember everything word for word. The script itself was actually a rather... interesting read and did tell her some more information about them but not as much as expected. She decided to give up and read the last four pages.

_Questions for Asami... half a page._

_Where not to go when... half a page.  
><em>

_What _not _to do in an emergency situation... one page.  
><em>

_'My next door neighbour is a very adept ventriloquist don't mind her if she starts talking from a mirror.' _

_'If someone comes to you about demons ignore them utterly and completely and call for Elsie or me.'_

_This is a message for Elsie... better not read that... what is this about, who's Fiore?_

She stopped reading and found that Elsie had been shaking her to go to the bath.

"Yui, you need to go now; you didn't wash last night either, you're going to get really dirty!" Elsie repeated this a few times until she realised that Yui had finally noticed, "Seriously, you're starting to become a bit like nii-sama, at least when he really concentrating." she commented.

"Ah, sorry sorry, I'll go right now and there's a message for you." she pointed at the screen, "Are you really bad at Japanese? It's all written in hirigana."

"Kind of, I was never all that good at anything." Elsie laughed, "Oh yeah, Kami-sama told me to give this to you." she handed the PFP to her.

"Oh, thanks." she looked at it with a confused expression but decided to put it in his uniform pocket in case it was needed for something.

She took the white blindfold and left for the bathroom, leaving Elsie to read the message.

…

Next morning, things weren't so hectic but Mari finally came to the conclusion that 'Keima' had somehow lost his memories and that was the only explanation to why he was being so nice (funny person...). Well, after that, it was just pleasant conversation and jokes over the table. They left for school and Mari seemed to be in a good enough mood as she bade them farewell. Elsie and Yui chatted about some unimportant things and when they finally arrived at school, Yui told Elsie that she'd be up in the classroom later and that she had something she needed to do in the library. On the way there, she took out the PFP and examined it and was able to turn it on without much difficultly. It seemed that the game slot was empty and there was an icon which could link it to the internet.

_Wow, this is like a mini laptop or something. I mean, it's even got a proper retractable keyboard!_

She pocketed the console and walked towards the librarian's desk but there was no-one there.

_Maybe she's gone to the classroom already._

She decided that since there was nothing much to do, she'd browse the shelves to pass the time and it seemed that Shiori was in the library as she spotted her reaching for a tightly wedged book on a shelf that was rather high.

"Ah, Shiomiya-san!" Yui called, causing Shiori to look around in surprise and the book was freed, sending the others scattering to the floor. Shiori herself fell back in surprise.

Yui processed this quickly and in an instant, she was underneath her and trying to catch her. Unfortunately, she found this a bit too much and they were both sent sprawling onto the floor. The PFP fell out of her pocket.

"Shiomiya-san, are you alright? I'm sorry for scaring you like that." Yui apologised while she instinctively reached over for the PFP.

"No, I'm sorry for..." she trailed off as she grappled for something in her head.

"What's the matter?" Yui asked as she turned the console on to ensure that she hadn't broken it.

Shiori's line of sight was drawn to the PFP as the screen suddenly shone brightly. Her eyes widened as she saw a memory known only to her.

"Katsuragi, I remember now. It was you, you were the one who changed me!"

…

After Elsie had separated from Yui, she went to the gates to wait for Keima.

_I wonder how long I'll have to wait._

A car with blacked out windows pulled up outside the school gates and 'Yui' stepped out, her mother talking to her and obviously being rather unhappy about something. 'She' simply smiled warmly and moved with unrivalled grace. Bidding her mother a warm goodbye (much to her mother's surprise), she told the driver to take her home safely. But as expected of him, the façade wore off as soon as 'her' back was turned and he walked straight to Elsie.

"Did you read it?" he asked and looked around, "Where's Yui?"

"She went to the library and yes I did read it... why do you not trust Fiore? She's come here to help us." Elsie asked.

"Who was she to you? You seem to know each other." Keima asked back walking towards the library with a PFP in hand.

"Well, I don't really know her very well but she was Haqua's rival, she's no. 2 in our class you know." Elsie explained.

"I don't know and I don't trust her, she's the sort of character who 100% suspicious whether she's been sent or not." he grumbled as they went in through the automatic doors of the library, "Anyway, what do you think Yui's doing in here? She's risking reviving Shiori's memories if she keeps up the meetings with her."

_Well, I should find Shiori first and make sure they don't..._

He watched in disbelief as the event unfolded in front of him.


	25. Chapter 24: A critical observation

"Oh dear, are you two alright?" 'Yui' asked as 'she' appeared around the corner of the bookshelf, 'she' shot a brief cold look at 'Keima' which 'she' hoped would be interpreted correctly.

"You..." Shiori was clearly confused by the sudden disruption.

"I was just looking around when you two suddenly fell over." 'Yui' smiled pleasantly, "I'll help you pick up the books."

"But..."

"Hey, Kami-nii-sama, what are you doing here?" Elsie jumped out from behind full of vigour, "Ah, Shiomiya-san, you're here as well. This is just great, I want to borrow a few books about fire engines!"

Shiori was ushered away enthusiastically but before she was completely out of view, 'Keima' picked up the book and ran to her.

"You forgot this book." Yui said smiling warmly at her as she passed her the bulky book.

"Th-thank you." Shiori answered, blushing bright red, snatching the book and quickly covering her face out of habit.

_Don't encourage her! God, how I want this month to end as quickly as possible._

Keima waved to Elsie to get a move on and she complied pushing Shiori away and talking about fire engines (maybe a bit too loudly in a library as Shiori pointed out at some point).

Yui came back to help Keima put the books back.

"Shiomiya-san is a nice girl, isn't she?" she spoke quietly since they were in the library.

"Did you read the documents I sent you." Keima said, ignoring Yui's comment.

"Yes but... are you really suggesting I remember all of that?" Yui asked meekly, "it's about twenty odd pages of stuff..."

"Well, I don't mind a few slip ups." Keima answered, "There is some leeway in the error you can make..."

"What?" Yui was further confused by this.

"Oh, it's nothing that concerns you." Keima said with a faraway look in his eyes.

"We should break up here for now." he said shaking his head, "I need some time to think."

He looked at her with uncertainty and Yui did not know how to respond because she did not know whether she could trust herself to be him either. At the same time, she was perplexed by this action. In her mind, she'd already assumed him to be a confident person and a model student. He didn't seem to waver when they'd first swapped bodies but she realised that maybe, just maybe, he wasn't the same person she'd thought he was.

_We need to return soon, don't we?_

They finished picking up the books and putting them back on the shelves.

"One more question," Yui announced, "what was that thing about demons?"

"I'll tell you about it later but for now I don't really want to talk about it." he said.

Yui didn't enquire any further and they parted ways.

_All I need to do is to do my best right? I need to hope that if he was like that, then that side of him will return._

…

Not long after Yui had sat down in her classroom after greeting a few surprised teachers on the way, Elsie arrived. She was hugging a few books about fire engines and grinning from ear to ear.

"Elsie, you look so happy. Are fire trucks really that amazing?" Yui asked before Chihiro and the others could greet her. They looked at her with mild surprise.

"You bet, fire engines are really cool and I really love that shiny red colour..." she gabbled on.

"Katsuragi, you're kinda different today. Did something happen?" Ayumi asked.

"Hmph, you shouldn't talk to him, he just suddenly set Elsie off. It gonna take ages to make Elsie calm down." Chihiro turned and tried to bring Elsie back into the world.

"I'm sorry, it was just that Elsie looked so happy..." Yui trailed off.

Now Ayumi looked surprised.

"Hahaha, 'sorry', that's rare," Ayumi laughed while she slapped Keima's back with no consideration as to how much strength she'd put into that, "I guess I'll leave you to cool down for a bit." she joined Chihiro in the quest to save Elsie from her 'fire engines obession syndrome'.

_I've messed up somehow... I wanted to find out more about Keima-sama._

Since the window was now further away, she didn't look out of the window and resorted to leaning onto the desk. Not too long after, Elsie came over and sat next to her.

"Is something bothering you?" Elsie asked showing concern, she'd never seen Keima like this and someone else doing the unlikely actions felt weird to her... and everyone else observing.

"Mmm, it's nothing much. I was just wondering what Keima is like." she said quietly.

Elsie proceeded to speak her true thoughts: "He's an amazing person who's confident in everything he does. He's helped me countless times... I'd describe him as godly." she finished unable to think of anything else other than that.

_That might be rather short but I can tell how amazing he must be. Even if I won't ever be able to match him I'll still do my best._

"Has he been uncertain with anything before at all?" she asked thinking back to the look she'd got from Keima.

"Of course not, how did you get that thought? He's calm in any situation even if he can be a bit whingy at times but he's never worried." she beamed brightly.

"I see. He's a nice person then." Yui said.

"Well... sort of, he's sort of... misunderstood?" she didn't seem to be very convinced herself.

Seeing that Elsie wouldn't be of too much use, she allowed her to go off to her friends who asked her what she was talking about, not that they were all that interested... maybe.

…

Keima got up to the classroom and took out his PFP, noting that Tsukiyo and Mio weren't in yet. But that annoying Fiore was sitting in her seat. At least, she was currently being bombarded with questions from the other students that were in the classroom. Apparently, they hadn't asked enough yesterday. They eyes met for a brief moment before Keima looked down at his loading PFP. Not long later, Fiore excused herself and went to join Keima who had already plunged into a route that he was playing from yesterday.

"Hey." she said, trying to get his attention.

"Please wait a moment while I save." he said back tonelessly.

_I guess I have to speak, after all, I'm supposed to be Yui. _He attempted to get to a save spot.

Fiore was impatient but she waited and within half a minute, Keima already had the PFP on the desk and turned off.

"Yes?" he said brightly.

"I'm sorry about yesterday. You must have felt uncomfortable when I kept on staring at you." Fiore said, "I was just wondering what you were like. You seem to be rather... unconcerned about your surroundings."

_Is she trying to find the cause of 'my' gap?_

"Well, I was certainly concerned about the sudden attention I'm getting from you." he remarked.

"Is there anything you're unhappy about?" she asked.

_Straight to the point, eh._

"No, and why would I want to tell you if I had anyway?" he threw back.

"I guess that's true." she laughed unconvincingly, trying to ease the tension.

"If you don't mind, I'll go back to my game."

…

Meanwhile, Fuse Aoba was thinking, thinking about her newly acquired information. She didn't know whether she could consider herself lucky or not for the slim chance that she was able to witness the little event in the library.

_What is the meaning of this?_

Uncharacteristically, her thoughts were affected by her emotions and she struggled to analyse the information she'd obtained any further than she already had. Before it started to stray into territory which she never wanted to consider. This mental battle went on for a while and she could not properly focus as demonstrated when she missed her name during registration. But as a genius, she wasn't going to let this go and she was determined. She glanced at Shiori who was now in the classroom looking slightly flushed.

_If I heard the librarian right then what does it mean? Are there more people who have had a similar experience, who are related to Katsuragi Keima in a similar fashion?_

Her thoughts started to wonder to the other girl who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and gotten him out of the situation which she was sure that Keima could get out of with no problem.

_Dammit, I would really have wanted to hear what they were talking about. Should I 'meet' Keima first or confront that girl and see what their relationship is?_

She arrived at a very simple conclusion though.

_Katsuragi Keima is the mysterious entity in the whole equation. He may not hold all answers to all questions but he must be the origin... right?_

She stopped thinking and took out her PFP, tapping mercilessly at the buttons._  
><em>


	26. Chapter 25: A distant memory

For a while, the Friday morning was relatively normal for Yui and she decided to stay in class during break and help out with the odd jobs in her mission to be 'Keima the model student'. It was soon to become awkward and embarrassing and the problem never occurred to her until the tidal wave hit. It arrived in the form of a PE lesson and as normal on Fridays, it was with class 2-D and it was boys in one classroom and girls in the other.

_Don't look, don't look, don't look..._

Changing herself without a classroom of boys around her was already hard enough, she didn't want to risk doing something completely and absolutely wrong so she resorted to covering his face with his PE clothes and waiting until everyone had gone away.

"What the hell are you doing, Otamega?" one of the boys asked in a slightly mocking tone, "Aren't you usually supposed to be playing on your PFP at this time?"

Yui was so intent on ignoring her surroundings that she didn't hear him and since he was ignored he wasn't bothered to pursue any further. It was customary to ignore him anyway. Soon, the classroom was empty and Yui was finally left alone to change. Not that she was looking forward to it at all and in the end, she was late for the lesson which made the PE teacher make her run laps around the circuit before she could participate. It practically almost killed Yui.

"Still rubbish in PE aren't you?" one of the boys noted mockingly when Yui fell down again.

"You're... so... lucky." Yui panted, "You get to play football with breaks in the middle."

The boy looked surprised, he ran to his friends and started chatted excitedly about something. For now, Yui wasn't interested. She'd only been able to run three laps in fifteen minutes and she was sure that walking was actually faster than running when it came to Keima, not that the teacher allowed it.

…

"The PE teacher was so mean. Why did he have to make me run like that?" Yui complained to Elsie, she suddenly thought of something, "Elsie, did Keima say anything about yesterday? My class has PE on that day."

Elsie laughed nervously at the implications of what Yui said and after some thought she said: "Man, I bet he was too focussed on the game to notice anyway."

"Game?" Yui asked, perplexed at what Elsie said.

"It's nothing. Seriously, I'm pretty sure he's not that sort of person." Elsie gibbered.

"Right, since it's lunch now, I will confront him about it."

_God, I hope he's not a pervert._

…

Fuse Aoba looked into classroom 2-A and found the girl.

_So she's Goido Yui, the daughter of a rich traditional family._

It was slightly annoying to see that she also seemed to be an avid gamer though it perplexed her as the research she'd done seemed to tell her that this wasn't supposed to be how she behaved. Nonetheless, she'd decided to confront her first and as she summoned up the courage, someone barged past behind her.

_Ow... isn't that Keima?_

…

"Keim- Yui-san, I want to talk to you for a moment." Yui said as she burst into the classroom. This earned her a few glares from around the classroom.

As she drew near Keima who was saving his game, Mio suddenly got in her way.

"Commoner, how dare you speak her name so casually." she said haughtily, crossing her arms.

"Mio, it been a while, hasn't it?" Yui burst out then realised her mistake.

"How dare you act so familiar..." she trailed off, "I don't even know why I'm talking with you!"

Keima finally butted in: "Mio, it's fine. Let him talk."

"Yui, it's because you're too nice that parasites keep coming to you, you need to know how to say no!" Mio complained, concerned for the wellbeing of her friend.

_She doesn't seem to remember at all yet... to refer to me as a parasite..._

"What did you want to talk about?" Keima smiled pleasantly at Yui.

"I-it's about PE yesterday." his cheeks coloured up.

At this point, Keima had spotted Aoba peeking in around the corner.

"Nothing much happened, don't worry. It was easier to move in fact." Keima replied bluffly.

Mio was confused as what they were saying: "Who is this man, what's this thing about PE lessons?"

She glanced at 'Keima' and Keima could see that she seemed to be battling something inside her.

"Nothing, just being erm... random." she finished lamely and as she knew that there was no way to converse properly with Keima with someone else around.

"I'll accompany you back to your classroom since I want to see Elsie as well." Keima said to Yui as he got up.

"A-are you sure you should accompany this vulgar man?" Mio asked, "there's a limit to how polite you should be."

_I'll need to check up on her after this but for now..._

"I'll be fine. Let's go Katsuragi-san." Keima said.

"Katsuragi..." Mio whispered, "Yui, is this man the reason you're so weird these days?"

_Crap..._

"Umm, Katsuragi, you should go on without me, I'll join you shortly." Keima said quickly, hoping he could get Yui away.

"Stop! Yui, if I remember correctly, he's that Otamegane who plays his games in class and you've been doing that recently. What's happening? You can tell me if that parasite has done something to you!" she said loudly.

_I don't want to do physical things any time in anybody._

"Yui, Fuse's out there. Remember the lines." he whispered in his ear and then pushed her out of the classroom.

Mio seemed to run out of steam as 'Keima' left the classroom.

"That person really annoys me for some reason." Mio remarked.

"Why?"

"I don't know. For some reason, he reminds me of something distant... the flower banquet? No, that can't be right, I was dancing with..." Mio struggled to collect her thoughts.

"What do you remember?" Keima said, maybe too forcefully.

"Huh. What? Why would you want to know." Mio looked at her suspiciously.

"I don't know, I didn't see you that day so I thought you never attended." he picked his words carefully analysing what he could and couldn't say from the knowledge he had.

"I think I was dancing with Morita then but for the past few days I've been slightly uncertain about that. Last night, the feeling sort of went away and... I really don't know." she said helplessly, "In any case, it was a strange night because it felt like everything had changed. It couldn't be that simple."

_So does that mean her memories have already been remodified. Wait... that also means that not everyone's going to be pestering me for a month!_

"Yui, are you okay? It must that horrendous man, let's go confront him!" Mio said enthusiastically, steering them away from her subject.

"No thanks, I can cope on my own. Trust me." Keima said.

"If you say so then I'll see you later." she skipped away, presumably to buy an omelet-soba bread for lunch.

He quickly stepped outside the other door Yui had went out by to find Yui struggling with Aoba who now seemed to be rather distraught.

_What the heck has been happening?_


	27. Chapter 26: An out of character meeting

Yui stumbled outside and crashed into Aoba who was alarmed by the suddenness of it.

_Damn, I couldn't get the first move in. _Aoba thought.

"Aoba? What are you doing here?" Yui said.

"I should be the one asking you. Who's that girl?" she pointed angrily at 'Yui' who was talking to Mio.

"As I told you, who I meet with is none of your concern."

"Did you forget so quickly how I feel for you." AOba embraced 'him'.

By now, there were people pointing at them and whispering amongst themselves. Yui started to become uncomfortable. It was a bit too much attention towards her and unlike Keima she couldn't be immune to it and control her speech according to her surroundings.

"Umm, can't we go somewhere else to talk about this, there's quite a bit of er... a crowd around us." Yui tried to convince her.

_Keima is concerned about his surroundings? He's weaker than I remember him but... he's not really reacting to my physical contact. Did I make a mistake last time?_

"What about the library this morning?" Aoba said looking up at him, "What did that librarian mean by she 'remembered' you?"

"Huh? What?" Yui stuttered.

_Even though I'm surprised I do remember any of this despite only reading it once but this wasn't in the lines._

She thought about it some more until she remembered that it only happened this morning.

_How do I answer?_

"How come you remember her but not me?" Aoba started to go out of control.

…

_ I was never concerned that he might not remember me. If he didn't then it didn't matter. It would be like starting a clean slate, a new game. It didn't matter as long as I could have him even if I was the only one to remember what we did. I did wonder about the possibility that he would reject me by saying that he didn't remember. I didn't mind as long as he masked it well because I would capture him back... is what I thought but each of my carefully planned meetings were ruined by my impulsiveness. I wanted him to remember. I never occurred to me that I did once forget those precious memories._

_ I didn't like it when he was making moves on others with those lines. The lines that weren't his style but nonetheless, lines for capturing the target. Then there was another girl, he never needed help and yet he looks at her like that. I didn't want to bear it. I wanted to let go because he was such a terrible creature but my heart wouldn't let me. I thought that I could save him. _

_ But now, something made me stop in my tracks for a brief moment. Why did I forget? Why was he making moves when I remembered all over again. He was always shut off from the real world. I'd had a taste of his limitless talent with galges. It was the only thing where I couldn't beat someone. My memories ended there._

_ Something new made me doubt again. It was the librarian. It made me wonder _who_ he was. Now, it had become more significant that he confesses that he remembers and tell me everything. I know he knows for he remembers me as a genius, a threat. Doesn't he?_

…

Keima couldn't help Yui what with the crowd around her but he was also open to the possibility that Aoba would stop him and it would probably give Yui some breathing space.

"What about you?" Aoba said loudly, whirling around to face him.

"Wh-what? What about me?" Keima squeaked.

_Talk about jinxing myself..._

"Do you remember him as well or something?" Aoba cried.

"Remember?" Keima asked back.

_Is she not convinced anymore? I guess she is a genius after all._

Yui butted in and much to Keima's relief it wasn't something that would make the situation worse.

"Can we just talk about this somewhere with less people?" she pleaded.

Aoba calmed down.

_Is Keima finally going to tell me the truth?_

"Fine, we'll go to the rooftop, it's quiet there." Aoba stated.

"No, let's go to the sports grounds." Yui said quickly, remembering the document that Keima had sent her.

Aoba looked at 'him' suspiciously but complied to 'his' request.

…

"Well?" Aoba asked 'Keima' expectantly.

"What do you mean 'well'?" Yui asked back, glancing uncertainly at Keima who was just standing there with her arms crossed.

As a genius, there was no way she could've missed that flicker of movement.

"And you," she pointed at Keima, "when and how did you meet Keima?"

For some reason, Keima found that he was genuinely surprised and a bit flustered even though he knew that she would say that.

"I-I met him on Tuesday when I bumped into him on the stairs." he stammered.

_I guess this isn't too bad but..._

"Is there anything else?" Aoba fired at him straight away.

"N-no, that really was the first time we'd met." Keima said frantically, eager to not be the target of her flaming tongue.

_I swear she isn't supposed to be like this though. Did remembering me really have that big an impact?_

"Stop it, you're scaring her!" Yui commanded.

_Yui, I don't do that..._

"Why are you so concerned about her then, the Keima I know doesn't even take notice of-" she was interrupted by a loud shout from Keima.

"What's the matter?" Yui ran over to him to see what had happened.

"Stomach cramp. Bloody heck, so painful. I need to go to the toilet." Keima complained grouchily, shaking off Yui who he felt was too close.

"D-don't tell me..." Yui trailed off as she suddenly remembered something, she blushed.

"Go find Asami." he whispered simply, "Umm, could you come with me to the toilets?" he asked Aoba.

"No, you can go yourself. I need to get to the bottom of this." she looked meaningfully at 'Keima' who was now being rather fidgety.

"I-I wanted to tell you something though..." Keima said anxiously.

Aoba was suddenly interested.

"Can't you tell me here?" she asked.

"I don't want to let Katsuragi hear about this though..." he said, still wincing from the pain in her stomach.

"Fine, I'll listen to what you have to say."

...

_I need to find him._  
>Despite telling herself this, she still didn't move from her post.<em><br>What should I say?_  
>She grappled in her to make a decision and decided to give up and carry on with her story. After scribbling and ripping out a few pages, she gave up. Even though the memory was now so clear, it was too clear. It constantly interfered with her concentration and pace. Once again, a strange feeling came over her and she saw that strange shiny thing again, it made a few lazy loops and led her eyes to the bookshelf on the far side.<em><br>What's that?_  
>The brightness had disappeared by now but she ventured around the bookshelf anyway even though she didn't expect to find anything.<em><br>It's my imagination again, huh?_


	28. Chapter 27: A passion to know

Keima and Aoba walked side by side in silence. Aoba was waiting expectantly for Keima to start, while he fidgeted, pondering over what to say. Neither of them were playing on their PFPs but it wasn't like Keima didn't want to. In fact, Keima was itching to play on his PFP which would probably soothe him in the atmosphere but the situation meant he shouldn't. Although he could not yet think of anything, he knew he had to start before she started to become impatient and maybe do something unpredictable like she had done over the past few days..

"Umm, I can't call you 'you' forever so what's your name?" Keima asked trying to buy time.

"I'm Fuse Aoba, I don't have much time so can you just quickly tell me what you want to tell me?" she replied resolutely.

"That's a nice name." he paused for a moment to go over the routes, "Why do you want to know about Katsuragi from me? You seemed to know him better so why from me, who has only known him for two days?"

"Are you sure you've only known him for two days?" Aoba asked coldly, "How do you know that your memories haven't been altered?"

"What are you talking about? Have you been reading to many stories? I'm sure that doesn't happen in real life." Keima scoffed at her.

"It's true, didn't you hear that librarian say that she'd remembered him?" she asked, starting to lose her patience.

__I need to proceed quickly but I feel like my head is all muddled up. How can I pick up the pace?__

"You know, you can interpret that in hundreds of ways. Stop being so stuck on the tiniest details." they passed the girls toilets and Aoba stopped.

"Don't you understand that in a battle against that person, even the tiniest details can be the turning point?" she shouted angrily, attracting surprised looks in their direction.

"Fuse-san, calm down. There's lots of people looking our way now!" he stated in a flustered fashion, while taking her hand and dragging her away towards the faculty toilets which were further down the corridor near the staff office.

They finally arrived and Aoba inwardly agreed with the decision to come here, interpreting it in the Keima wanted her to. After checking that no-one was inside, they went in. Without thinking, Keima took his PFPs and placed them on the sink where it was dry and went into a cubicle. He had been slightly traumatised when he'd sat down on the toilets and his PFPs slipped out, one cracking from the impact on the floor and the other cushioned from impact by landing in the bin at some point yesterday. As of now, those PFPs were safe at home but for him, it wasn't worth risking another two PFPs.

"Oh God, this is such a bloody mess." Keima complained while Aoba looked at the two PFPs thoughtfully, she suddenly realised something.

"Goido-san," she smiled triumphantly although this was unknown to Keima, "how did you start playing games?" she picked up one of the consoles.

Keima thought about this for far longer than he should usually do but as her words sunk in, he realised that he'd made a terrible mistake. He really shouldn't have left his PFPs outside and now he was going to pay. It would take so much time and effort to make her steer away from the right track, it was no longer an worthwhile route to keep her from the truth, at least part of it. Well, he tried to prevent this anyway.

"Don't you dare turn on my PFPs. If you do, I'll kill you." he said on impulse.

When he realised that it was most definitely not the best choice of words, it was too late as the words had already come out of his mouth.

__Damn, why did I... no, wait a minute. If I can get this right, isn't that my ticket out of this cursed event? I need to get out quickly.__

"Hmm, isn't this a galge you've got in here?" she asked as Keima came running out of the cubicle and snatched it from her before she could check what his email address was.

"What are you talking about? Do you think I would play something like that?" he shouted, trying to blush but failing to do so in the unfamiliar body.

She frowned, realising that she'd probably made a wrong move of asking her question.

__If I didn't do that, I might have found out more, but this should be enough if she's what I think she's like.__

"Answer my question, how did you start playing games or should I say, galges?" she smirked snatching the other PFP sitting on the sink behind her. She waved it mockingly.

__Oh, what the hell? I'm starting to wonder whether leaving myself out of this and letting Yui think about this was actually a better plan...__

_…_

Meanwhile, Yui had been heading back to the classroom but it seemed that Asami was already waiting at the spot they had their lunch yesterday which had been 100 metres away from where Yui had just been talking to Keima and Aoba, as measured by the straight on the track circuit next to them. Asami looked up and shyly greeted her, shifting aside as an invitation for 'Keima' to sit next to her.

"The weather's so nice today. It seems that summer hasn't completely abandoned us yet." Asami said as a cool breeze blew past, dislodging a few leaves from the tree which they sat under.

"Yes, you're right." Yui said simply as she relaxed under the shade.

Asami snapped out of her reverie and reached for the bundle beside her.

"Katsuragi, here's your lunch." she handed a green box to 'him' and proceeded to say: "Umm, I don't know if it's just me but you seem a bit different than usual."

"In what way?" although Yui wanted to ask those questions Keima had given her, she was also interested in what Asami would say about Keima.

"I mean, you haven't been playing games at all and I don't know... it's almost like you're trying to be a model student." she looked at Yui uncertainly, "I don't know why but, I don't want you to change from who you really are. I remember the time when I used to try and get on everyone's good side but one day, it suddenly clicked for me that I didn't want to and that it was a waste of time. I felt that someone once taught me that but please, don't go down the same road I did for such a long time." she finished, breathing heavily from the long speech.

Even though she fancied Keima, that didn't mean that she wasn't going to feel sick making conversations and long speeches.

"But I don't understand..." Yui said falteringly as she didn't know how to respond how Keima was like.

"Is this really your true self? I'd always admired you because you were never scared of being different, to go down your own route regardless of how others saw you, what society expected of you. Do you really want to be one of the many?" she asked passionately, she realised how she might have sounded and tucked into her bento viciously, trying to hide the embarrassment.

Yui realised that she wouldn't get any further answers and proceeded with Keima's plan.

"Yoshino-san, I was just wondering..." she paused as he'd told her and she wondered how she could remember all of those details.

"Yes?" Asami raised her head from her already half eaten bento and looked at 'Keima' questioningly.

"Er, have we met somewhere before? I mean, before we started eating lunch together." she averted her eyes as if trying to remember something.

"Hmm, no. As far as I remember... actually I don't know. I'm sure I haven't because I would definitely remember but..." she gave up as she had countless times before, "No, we haven't." she smiled.

"Ah, I see. It's nothing then." Yui replied.

"Or maybe you saw my little sister, we're twins you see and we actually look the same as each other." she laughed although her complexion was slightly paler than when they had started.

But then, Yui didn't know of the fact that Asami just didn't like talking. In any case, Yui stopped talking anyway as she had to eat and she knew her manners and they passed the time in silence. After they finished eating, they chatted a little more on trivial things on the way back to the classroom. Well, at least until Asami suddenly said she had to go do something important and excused herself, hurrying away. Yui sighed, hoping that maybe this time, she might get a proper explanation from Keima about what was going on. She swore that the subject always seemed to slip away before she could actually find out anything. It was like he was excluding her even though she was part of it and she was getting a little mad about it. She started to go over in her head what she might say and she bumped into someone while she was busy concentrating.

"Ah, I'm sorry. Are you okay?" Yui asked as she watched the other girl.

As the girl raised her head and Yui suddenly remembered her mostly from the scarf thing that floated around her which she noted looked a lot like Elsie's.

"Aren't you the transfer student that I bumped into yesterday?"


	29. Chapter 28: A little closer to the truth

"It's none of your business! Now give it back to me!" Keima screamed in distress as he tried to snatch the PFP from her grasp.

"Dammit! It doesn't matter what abnormalities there are in your memory, just tell me if you have ever wondered about something like a presence that helped you or something. Now!" Aoba's voice rose until she was shouting at the end, and she grabbed him.

"What the hell are you doing? Get off me now!" he yelled, forgetting about the PFP that was now in his reach.

Keima never thought of her as an impulsive person and seeing her get this emotional was starting to unnerve him. By all means, he did not expect her to change in this way and not so hugely either. The Fuse Aoba from the past who was unemotional and had no purpose in life had now snapped. Although it could possibly all be an act, it was safer to be pessimistic and assume that she was really being unstable. It occurred to him that if he did not stop this attitude from becoming worse, there was every possibility that a runaway spirit could possess her again and _he _would be the cause or at least part of it. It would be difficult to extract the spirit in the state he was in and without her realising the truth about... everything. Of course, that would make it even harder as she would know that she would soon have her memories altered again and the gap would probably get even wider. Keima had also never known of Hell altering the girls memories before the capture ended and they wouldn't be able to do so either at the moment.

_Jeez, why is reality so unpredictable. I always thought that this was the girl that would be the least swayed by your unreasonable tricks._

Aoba looked at him carefully, noting the slight redness that had come to Yui's cheeks. She let go of him, placing the PFP back on the sink and took a few steps back towards the door, taking deep breaths. She looked straight into her eyes and smirked.

_What the heck is she up to now? _

"You're not the person I expected. I'd always placed you in the..." she trailed off, thinking deeply for a few moments.

"No... but... hmm..." she muttered.

Keima let her think. It gave her time and it gave him time and the truth was so far-fetched, it didn't seem possible for her to deduce anything that was remotely close to the truth.

"Keima wasn't playing on his games when I saw him today." she said.

Keima froze.

"You on the other hand, was. Even though there's every other genre of games, you're playing on galges."

_How much is she going to..._

"Two days ago, he reacted strongly to my physical contact and now he doesn't. Instead it's you..."

Keima went into a cubicle, flushed the toilet and ran for the door, ducking under the arm of the teacher who came in.

"What the hell are you-" Fuse started.

"Students aren't allowed to use these toilets, there's toilets further down the corridor so why can't you just use them." the teacher shouted as Fuse apologised neutrally and made her exit, finding that 'Yui' was already gone.

…

_That was a pretty close call. Well, I would've escaped anyway and that teacher at the end was a nice touch. Must have been all that screaming. Well, I guess I need to leave her alone for long enough now to dismiss any wild thoughts. But God, she's practically going to consider everything now, isn't she?_

He went straight to his classroom and hoped not to see Elsie. He did.

"Elsie, can you come here a moment?" he asked as sweetly as possible as he interrupted a conversation with her band.

"Yeah sure." she complied, following Keima out.

"Why did you leave her alone?" he asked as quietly as his anger would let him.

"What? But..."

"Don't you realise how vulnerable a situation you could put me in if you don't look out for her?" he asked, "Because of this stupid mess that Hell has caused me, the problem that I have a runaway spirit in me and she has that cursed collar has been magnified. You can't expect me to do everything can you?"

"I'm sorry." she apologised frantically, "Should we look for her now then?"

"Do you have to ask me about everything?" he shot back irritably.

…

"Ah, yes I transferred to this district yesterday. Nice to meet you." said Fiore smiling at 'him', "So you're Elsie's partner huh? I heard you did pretty well."

"Wha... well yeah, I guess." Yui started awkwardly, "Yes, I'm Elsie's brother but er... you know Elsie?"

"Why yes, we used to be in the same class but that was ages ago. I haven't seen her in decades." Fiore blabbed.

This only served to confuse Yui even more.

"Umm, I still don't know your name..." Yui said weakly, trying to decipher the words of this strange transfer student.

"Oh yes, that was rude of me. I'm Fiore, Fiore Loderia Lavigneri." she said, "What about you?"

"I'm Katsuragi Keima, nice to meet you Labigu..." she laughed in embarrassment as she struggled to pronounce her name.

"Fiore is fine, we call each other by our first names in the country I work in." she said, a hint of amusement in her voice.

"I see... well Fiore-san, I hope we become good friends."

"Yeah, I hope we get along well in this month. Anyway, how long has it been since you started?"

"What?" Yui asked.

"There's no way would forget something that life changing would you?" Fiore laughed.

Yui just looked at her with confusion. Out of habit, Fiore's eyes narrowed as she found something wrong with the situation.

"What's with that collar on your neck?" Fiore asked, testing 'him'.

Yui snapped out of her confusion and his hand went towards his neck, touching the cold unforgiving material.

"What's this?" she involuntarily asked to no-one in particular.

"Ah, so you don't know either. Well, I should be going now. I got other stuff to do. Bye." and she left her standing there.

Yui thought about it for a while and decided to walk back to the classroom and think about it there. While she walked down the corridor, she couldn't help fingering the strange collar around her neck.

_Just what's with this? There isn't a clasp or anything that I can remove it with..._

She slipped deep into thought but she was soon pulled out as her own voice brought her back to her senses.

"Hey, Katsuragi. What got into you?" Keima said to her in a concerned tone.

He wasn't concerned about her expression or her mood, it was the fact that his hand was fiddling with the collar on his neck and he started to wonder whether something really had happened in the time there was no-one around her to help, namely Elsie.

"Nothing much. I bumped into the transfer student and she seemed to be rather nice other than the fact that she was very confusing. Then she asked about the collar and I was just wondering, what is it for? I can't seem to remove it." she said distantly, finally letting go of the collar after clarifying that it was useless to keep trying.

"Well, let's just say it very important and you can't remove it." he said vaguely, glancing at Elsie who looked away.

"I see..." she was still half in a world of her own.

Keima suddenly remembered something relatively important.

"Katsuragi," he grabbed his arm starting to lead her away, "There's probably an English pop quiz this afternoon so I need to give you the answers." he said quickly.

This action dragged Yui back completely back into reality.

"What? Are you going to cheat or something? You not supposed to know this." she said uncertainly.

"I don't cheat." he said, pulling out pen and paper his or rather, Yui's bag.

He quickly scribbled a list of English words and sentences onto the piece of paper. After he'd finished, he gave it to her who looked at it in disbelief.

"Learn it well, I wasn't in the English lesson yesterday so I can't tell if it's going to be 100% accurate. You should be able to answer those ones though, since you were in the lesson yesterday." Keima said flippantly.

"Well, you see..." Yui wasn't sure how to break it to him.

"Don't tell me that you rubbish at English?" Keima asked her, concern creeping into his voice.

"I'm really good at Japanese literature, History, Art and I'm above average with-"

"So basically, If my answers aren't all as it is in the test, you're not going to get 100%." he said, "Did you listen to the lesson yesterday?"

"I tried but I didn't understand everything..." Yui said meekly.

Keima bowed his head in defeat then the bell for the end of lunch went off.

_Crap._

He quickly took out another PFP somewhere from the folds of Yui's uniform and pressed around with a godlike speed. He held his hand out to Yui.

"Give me the PFP I gave you."

She handed it over and he replaced it with the one he'd been desperately tapping on a few seconds ago.

"Keep it on. I'll be sending messages to you, we'll keep in contact."

Yui hurried away and he looked out of his classroom window and saw that the weather didn't look especially good.

_I hope the connection_ _isn't going to be really bad._


	30. Chapter 29: A world of headaches

Keima groaned as the sound of rain seemed to fill her ears.

_Why now? _

He desperately searched for a signal and it made the rest class look at 'her' with disapproving looks including Tsukiyo. Especially from the teacher who was none other than Nikaido-sensei who was reminded of another such person although whether she guessed what was happening already, she was her own witness. Other than that, Mio looked worried and slightly grossed out and Fiore noted it down as a trait. She was thinking about Elsie's buddy or as she'd learnt; Katsuragi Keima.

_What's with him? He doesn't seem to know about this runaway spirit business..._

Although it confused her, she did know that there were several possibilities, a few which she'd dismissed but she still didn't get it. She looked at Elsie's capture target who had finally given up on waving the device around like a weirdo.

_Oh well, thanks to that Nora, I think I already know what to do with Goido Yui anyway. Still, why the Hell have they arranged for me to be here rather than be free to search for those goddesses? This might be a girls school but really, I'm just wasting time here._

Keima had stopped waving the PFP around because he found that there was a weak signal of sorts and he was taking full advantage of this little time window he had cramming in as much information as he dared before he ran out. But then of course, his luck with the reply button had never been great. He slumped onto the desk.

_Reality, how many times do I need to ask you before you tell me why you hate me so much?_

…

Yui meanwhile, was sitting through a frankly boring lesson of maths and was sitting with the console hidden under the desk, waiting for an email to come. She didn't expect one to come as she looked at the bars on internet connectivity flicker annoyingly between none and one. Although she was a member of the Goido family, it didn't mean that she didn't get bored during lessons. Still, being in such a position had made her become rather too modest though she wasn't lying about English. Actually, she tended to find languages trickier than other subjects but her after-school lessons on the whole 'being posh' thing and other homework meant that she generally had no time to polish up on stuff that she wasn't too good at. She hoped that the piece of paper Keima had given her and the fact that she never got less than 70% would be enough. She took out the piece of paper and looked at it intently again, wondering how on earth he could possibly know the answers to an English _pop quiz_. She decided that it might be a good idea to look around seeing as there wasn't anything to do. Elsie had her head buried into the textbooks but presumably not understanding a thing, Asami was tapping her mechanical pencil while looking at the front of the classroom with vacant eyes and everyone else was just generally minding their own business. Until she looked over to her left and found that there was a girl who was staring at her or rather observing her with a slightly unsettled expression. It took her some time before she realised that Yui had looked over at her and she blushed, looking away quickly.

_There's just a lot of things that I don't get. Somebody should give me some answers soon._

…

Fuse Aoba sat in a Geography lesson tapping away on her PFP, bearing a scary face which caused the teacher to avoid disturbing her in any way. Besides, she was one of those people who liked to point out how wrong the teacher was when they taught an incorrect piece of information to the class just for the hell of it. It hadn't changed even after she'd picked up gaming but today was slightly different.

_Dammit, she ran away. Still, she made a mistake about being flustered, I'm probably on the right track then... but that's impossible. Maybe there's something else I missed._

Shiomiya Shiori who was not really concentrating on the class since she knew most of this from the part of her life which couldn't described in any other way than a huge reading spree. She kept thinking of the man that had taken her out of it, who was also the man she'd somehow forgotten about. She didn't understand how she could've forgotten him but she had and it didn't seem like Keima remembered her particularly well either.

_This seems like something out of a story. I wonder if it's going to be the happy romantic ending... I wouldn't mind the one that... what am I thinking of? _

She buried her head into her textbook which she'd already memorised inside out and back to front, blushing.

"Shiomiya, will you answer this question?" the teacher called, raising his head from the textbook and looking towards Shiori.

"Shiomiya!" the teacher yelled.

"Wh-what?" she asked, poking her head out from behind the textbook, revealing her blushing face.

The class laughed at this.

_Nooo, I'm embarrassing myself now._

Her head sunk back behind her shield of a textbook.

…

Keima had been unsuccessful throughout the lesson to send anything to Yui and now, during the little break when the teachers change around, he decided to it'd just have to be enough time for him to confide with Yui. No-one usually went out during this time except to go to the toilet and he exited the classroom, expecting to be the lone student. Instead, he found that someone had followed him out and not just to go to the toilet.

"Umm, Yui!" a boy's voice called at him from behind.

_I have no time for-_

"Please go out with me!" he stuttered loudly, no-one to bear witness as the noise in the classroom drowned out this small flag that was taking place just outside.

Keima couldn't bear to know of such a lame confession and he whirled around, ready to give this boy a lesson on how to confess but the boy got there first.

"Yui, I'm really worried about you. For the past two days, you've been playing games." he raised his head, "It was since the day that Otamega barged into our classroom and I've been worried about you."

_Disposing of this flag will be such an easy job._

"Stop sticking your nose into my business, it's rude. Besides, your confession tactics are terrible." he said as he whipped out a piece of chalk from nowhere.

He wrote down: 'meeting - events; regular contact - confession' on the floor. The boy looked at this in disbelief thinking that she couldn't have changed like this in such a short while and wondered whether she'd been like this all along.

"Right." Keima spoke as he put the chalk away.

"The first meeting," he pointed to the first of the boxes on the diagram, "is all about impact. It doesn't matter whether it's a good or bad impression. Make her remember you."

The boy was rather rattled at this point.

"Next comes the events!" her finger slid down to the next box, "The purpose is to build up the relationship with each other. Keep doing this until you know each other quite well, balancing out..."

At this point, the boy decided it might be a good idea to stay out of this. He left, leaving Keima explaining to thin air.

"...and then you confess!" he said with a flourish turning around to find a History teacher looking at him with disapproval.

"Goido Yui, are you the one who drew all over the floor?" she said.

_Ah crap, I was supposed to go find Yui..._

"Ahahaha..." Keima pulled out a PFP where there been a packet of tissues yesterday, "Well..."

Suddenly, something clicked for him as he thought back to the rubbish confession from the boy a few moments ago.

_What have I been doing? I've been so wound up about the other girls that I've practically forgotten to consider Yui herself. So much for thinking about observation as a side job. Dammit, I hope I haven't missed the point where we'd reach the limit of leading each others' life._

While in deep thought, the PFP was snatched from Yui's hand and he was ordered back into the classroom.

_I'll have to test that later._


	31. Chapter 30: A temporary focus

_Phew, the English pop quiz ended, I hope I did well._

Yui had been rather nervous about the test and uncharacteristically for Keima, she was still desperately checking over the answers when it ended when Keima would usually have sat there in absolute boredom itching for his PFP while expertly spinning his pen while wondering why he should get disqualified just for playing during tests. But he wouldn't want to make his life harder just because the teacher decided to give him '0' for playing in a test. As Kodama-sensei came around to collect the papers, he may have been surprised at this attitude of intense concentration when Keima'd usually be waving the test around with a look of boredom. For Kodama, it would've felt something like a triumph if 'Keima' hadn't been acting weird for the past few days. Of course, Yui didn't care to notice the slightly smug mixed with confused look from Kodama as she reluctantly handed the test paper over. Around her, she heard the classroom of people voice complaints about the pop quiz, she wanted to complain as well but she was still trying to maintain the model student image. What did surprise her though, was that she was completely ignored. No-one asked her what she thought she got, what the answers could be and to generally complain to her about it. She looked over to Asami to find her in a somewhat similar situation as herself so she walked over.

"Yoshino-san, how did you find the test?" she asked as she neared Asami.

Although the majority of the class didn't notice as they'd ignored 'him', it seemed that several were surprised at this. First was Asami who looked at her as if she'd just thrown a bomb at her, then there were two of the girls who were presumably Elsie's friends followed by the third one who noticed the shocked expressions on the faces of the other two. Elsie meanwhile, just looked worried.

When Asami recovered, it was not to greet her or anything of the sort, she choose to ignore. It was a rejection that caused Yui to wonder helplessly.

_Did I do something wrong?_

…

As soon as the bell rang for home time. Keima picked up Yui's bags and walked out of the room. He needed to slap in two events in the space of time that Yui's mum would get impatient and barge into the school. He was tapping on his PFP constructing an email. It was still drizzling but the connection had been hovering around 1 and 2 and after a bit of tapping, he sent the mail to himself. He stood outside classroom 2-B and found that Yui seemed to be slightly off as the '2-B Pencils' walked past him out of the classroom. It seemed that Elsie was too preoccupied with the conversation to notice him. He scanned the room and it seemed Asami wasn't here either, she probably went home. Yui jumped as she heard a loud 'Mail!' coming from under her or rather Keima's desk. Keima had set the settings to 'loud' from the PFP he was holding. Yui herself fumbled for the PFP while some of the people in the classroom looked at him some in disapproval, some in curiosity. She read the email but halfway through, another loud call from the PFP distracted her. Keima outside was tapping buttons, frantically trying to turn it back to silent. By the time he did a couple of bullies in the classroom had already singled him out after the PFP had squawked several times.

"Hey otamegane, how dare you disturb us, hmm?" they growled menacingly, advancing on him.

"S-s-sorry!" Yui squeaked in fear.

_Damn, can't be helped._

As he made to stop this and create an event that would raise her love points, a figure streaked past him and said in a loud commanding voice: "You guys, stop bullying him."

Her long silky hair splayed out majestically behind her, the maple brown eyes looking hard into the scared eyes of the bullies. Perhaps the most striking thing about this girl or more accurately, this young woman was not her profile but the fact that she was holding a cute little kitten in her arms. She was caressing it gently contrary to her rough actions, the sharp facial features she now showed and the voice that commanded full attention from the bullies. The 'parsley' stood there speechless.

"If you don't want to get hurt, I suggest you go scram." she spoke in the same majestic tone.

Keima could tell that the elder of the two didn't want to go head to head against the future head of the famous Kasuga school of martial arts but his pride was also on the line as his partner looked pleadingly and expectantly at him. In the end, pride won over. Still, Keima wasn't worried about that, his priority was to create an event even though he was also interested in Kusunoki's response to him.

_I should keep Yui's capture at top priority though._

He led Yui by the hand to the balcony of the classroom away from Kusunoki who was still lecturing the 'parsley'.

"Are you alright?" Keima asked her, staring intensely at her.

It was rather disconcerting to see their own faces so close to each other and Keima decided to pull away. There was probably some awkward tension building up between them and he felt it wasn't the right sort

"I'm okay." Yui said while blushing hard.

"I'm sorry about everything. It must be so hard on you." Keima said, he looked away.

"Don't worry, I'm seriously not hurt or anything. I was just shocked about how loudly your console went off." she smiled, trying to prove a point.

"No, that's not what I mean!" he grabbed hold of his shoulders, rendering Yui in a state of paralysis, "Ever since we swapped, I've just been selfishly dragging you into my own matters. It must have been so tiring to keep up with being me, I just can't..." he stopped.

"Please don't say that." Yui started quietly as she stood straighter, causing her hands to slip from his shoulders, "It's been so exciting living as you. You gave me freedom that I previously wasn't able to achieve and your family and the people around you show so much kindness to me. Besides, you've done all you could to help me out of sticky situations. You shouldn't be saying sorry. In fact, I should say thank you for everything new you've given me." she looked at him reassuringly.

"Still, I'll keep trying to find a way back." Keima took one step back and folded her arms.

"Yeah, I guess you should..." she leaned on the ledge of the balcony, "What if there's no way back?"

_She's even mentioned it before me, I missed the limit long ago..._

"I told you didn't I, I'd find a way!" he said forcefully, "Do you not trust me?" he grabbed Yui by the collar, taking her by surprise.

"K-K-Keima-sama?" she looked at him with wide eyes.

He let go of her, leaning heavily on the railings.

"I'm sorry, it just that I've been quite stressed for the past few days." he stroke through her hair, "We both want to get back so please help me for a little longer."

"Okay." Keima turned away from her, signalling the end of the event and she went back into the classroom.

_That's one event done._

He did not move from the balcony though as he was interested in Kusunoki's reactions as well. He did notice that Kusunoki had stayed in the classroom after her lecturing and had been staring at them while already.

"Thank you for saving me there. I wouldn't know what to do if you weren't there." Yui said.

Kusunoki just continued to stare at 'Keima' seemingly with a mixture of emotions but she seemed to merely toss them aside and walked away.

"Never mind..." she whispered.

_It may seem that she remembers as well._

* * *

><p>I know it's no longer than previous chapters and I myself wish that it would move along a bit faster but reality decided to turn its sights on me and now I have an annoying cousin in the house who constantly nags me to play with him, makes finding the right words really difficult. Also, I was surprised when the contents of the chapter suddenly deviated away from what I'd (half) planned so I had to spend a bit longer connecting bits together.<em><br>_


	32. Chapter 31: A confirmation of sorts

Keima and Yui walked down the corridor and parted ways at the stairs.

"Keima-sama, where are you going?" Yui asked.

"I need to go do something," he said vaguely, "and stop calling me Keima-sama."

"Okay... well, I wish you luck." she smiled at him.

_Right, time to do this._

He opened the door to classroom 2-C and bumped straight into Shiori. She just muttered a brief apology as she walked past though it didn't actually seem like she'd noticed. He continued to stare after her as she started to descend the stairs. As he was about to turn his attention to the classroom, a little girl that wasn't wearing a school uniform and was carrying a book under her arm was seen rushing downstairs after Shiori.

_What was that?_

He decided to have a look but by the time he got to the stairs and looked down, they were nowhere to be seen. He turned back to the classroom and there in front of him, was Aoba with her arms folded.

"Were you looking for me?" she asked with narrowed eyes, "Make it quick, I have no time."

"What's your relationship with Katsuragi-san?" he asked.

"Ask him because I have no idea either." she said with annoyance, "Do you think anyone would know what goes on in that brain of his except galges?"

"So is that why you keep pestering him?" he asked.

"'Pestering', that's quite a strange choice of word for you to use." Aoba said mildly.

"Well, I guess." he said looking away in mock embarrassment, knowing that she'd be making critical observations in him. He hoped it was enough.

"When I think about it, you look so funny like that." she laughed, walking past him.

_How long does he want to keep acting?_

Keima looked down, the cogs in her brain whirring furiously.

"I'm sorry for taking your time." he bowed down deeply to a surprised Aoba who'd glanced back.

She now doubted her theory, it was too absurd and he would never do that, would he?

"I still won't stop looking for an answer though." she said and made to walk away from the scene.

"Why?" Keima asked loudly to be heard.

_Why does she continue even though that was the scene closure?_

_If it doesn't go according to her logic, I'm sure to get the upper hand._

"You're so persistent. Do you think that you, who's only known him for a couple of days should be questioning the relationships that he has?" she was clearly annoyed.

"And you aren't being persistent, are you? You who doesn't even seem to know the relationship between you two." Keima retorted back, his head hurt.

"Why are you doing this? Why do you need to defend him?" Aoba asked.

Keima slowly walked up to her contemplating his choices.

"He's important to me. He came into my life at the time when I was burdened. For some reason, I feel he can help me." he said clasping his hands together as if hoping.

He felt that it sounded lame but at the same time, he knew those words must mean something to Aoba. Sure enough, it garnered some sort of reaction from her. Interest. But something about it seemed wrong.

"Is that what you really think?" Aoba smiled, she decided to bet on a theory with a flimsy base. She trusted her logic, however unrealistic it was.

"Do you have any troubles? I'm sure Keima will help." Keima said trying to be as wayward as possible while diverting the attention to her.

"What, me?" Aoba asked, "No, the only trouble I've had is you."

_God I hate her._

"A-am I being a nuisance?" Keima said quietly.

_Get into character...don't get found out._

But he had an inkling that it was never going to work out but he wasn't concerned. His brain had already started to think of the ways that she could be an asset to him but trying to control her was already out of question which was why he was never keen on the idea.

"Well, I wouldn't know." Aoba replied lightly. Although she doubted, she stuck to it.

In the brief silence that followed, another voice cut through the air.

"Yui!" Yui's mother shouted, "What's taking you so long?"

She dragged him towards her ignoring the fact that Aoba was right there.

_Dammit._

"Ah, it's nothing, good mother. I was just talking to my friend here." Keima replied, face muscles pulled into a forced smile.

"Well you have no time to talk." Yui's mother spoke hurriedly without sparing Aoba a glance, "You have to attend your Japanese dancing lesson now. If we don't hurry, we're going to be late."

Keima froze, realising that he'd been stuck into another dilemma. Aoba did not miss it and she couldn't stop her smile from widening further. It was a feeling she'd never felt before and it felt satisfying. Meanwhile, Keima just continued to think, trying to chose his options in the midst of his confused mind.

_Should I revolt against the mother and further reset the relationship and avoid stupid dance classes or be obedient and lessen Aoba's suspicion on me._

He didn't need to think any further.

"Well, have fun with your Japanese dance lesson," she walked right past him and whispered, "Keima."

She quickly disappeared down the stairs leaving Keima to contemplate the situation.

_As expected of the genius._

He found he did not seem to mind much that Aoba had found out and he turned his attention to a more pressing matter.

_Well, I guess I should revolt then._

"Yui, let's go." Yui's mother said and led him away.

Strangely though, he found that he couldn't seem to fully control his body and an invisible force seemed to let him be guided by the mother.

_Is this the result of being in Yui's body or something?_

He was desperate to do something but Yui's body wouldn't obey. He heard footsteps behind him and found that he could look around but he found no-one.

_NO! I don't want to do some stupid Japanese dance lesson!_

…

Yui stood in front of the shoe locker contemplating as to whether she wanted to go straight back to Keima's home. She initially wanted to just get back home as soon as possible to avoid giving Keima anymore trouble but her mind soon wandered to other things.

_I wonder how the wind instrument club is doing._

She found herself putting the outdoor shoes back into the shoe locker and putting on the indoor shoes. Just as she did that she heard footsteps coming into the building and she looked around the locker as she was putting the shoes on and found that the person was in fact her mother. Whom she missed to an extent but did not feel so... attached to anymore. Unlike how it was on the night of the swap where she couldn't hold back the overwhelming desire to hug her tight. But she failed to notice a little girl with a faint halo pattering towards the door and as Yui started to walked towards the stairs, bumped straight into her.

"Ah, I'm so sorry. Are you okay?"

The little girl looked up in fright, freezing on the spot.

_I swear everyone's frightened of me these days._

The girl looked out through the glass doors and seemed to see something else that shocked her. Yui turned to follow her gaze and saw Shiori.

"Are you..." Yui started, but she realised that the girl had somehow disappeared.

...

Shiori felt some amount of discomfort as she walked towards the library and realised that she wasn't wearing her outdoor shoes.

_Oh dear, I'll need to change back into my outdoor shoes. _

She hurried back to the east building wondering whether she could read and walk but after some thought she decided against it and looked up as she entered the building. She dropped her book, staring at a boy with a slightly confused face.

"K-K-Katsuragi-kun?"


	33. Chapter 32: An intersection of events

"Shiomiya-san?" Yui inquired realising that she'd just stepped into more unfamiliar territory. She'd really hoped to meet no-one who knew him.

_I really want to ask, but there's just so much that I want to ask about._

Shiori scooped up her book and gave a sideways look away from Yui stepping towards the shoe lockers to change her shoes. There was a long silence between them as the only sound that could be heard was the scuffling as Shiori put on her shoes. During this time, Shiori's face only became redder although this was hidden from view as the lockers hid her and this also hid Yui's apparent discomfort.

"Umm, Katsuragi-kun?" Shiori said.

"...Yes?" Yui desperately tried to find something to say.

"Are you..." Shiori stepped into view but as she looked up, she couldn't help but retreat behind her book.

"You look like you have something really important to say. What is it?" Yui couldn't bear to let the conversation drift into another long winded silence.

Aoba came trotting down the stairs with a small smile on her face from her previous encounter. Well, she would since she'd hit a jackpot even though she been betting on the most unlikely situation. She was probably expecting as big a prize as the risk. She suddenly noticed that Yui and Shiori were in the middle of an exchange. Yui gave a slight start and wondered why she was landed into these sorts of situations all the time since she came into this body, more like, why did she become so scared about meeting the wrong people? Aoba had already come up beside them to the shoe lockers where her shoes were kept.

_I hope she's not going to talk to me; she always makes me uneasy and Keima seems rather wary of her as well._

She tried to inch away from Aoba.

"I was just wondering whether you would help me with my story?" Shiori suddenly said, causing Yui to snap out of her thoughts although this question only served to put her in another one.

"_You're writing a story?"_

"_I'll be helping my friend with it."_

"Ah, forget I asked." she said loudly while blushing profusely for no apparent reason as far as Yui was concerned.

"Katsuragi," Aoba finally spoke, causing Yui to jump slightly "have you gotten used to life yet?"

Yui turned towards Aoba as the meaning of her words slowly sank in and the expression on his face caused Shiori to look between them two, trying to figure out how they could possibly be related to each other. Not that the question Aoba posed had made any particular sense as her brain started to process possibilities as to what the question meant. As far as she knew, Keima was a pretty unsociable person although she overlooked the fact that Keima had been the one to approach her from seemingly so long ago. Yui continued to edge away from Aoba.

"How-" Yui started.

"Yui! Are you alright?" a stricken voice pierced through the air and everyone looked up towards the stairs.

'Yui' walked around the stairs and her and Keima's eyes met.

_Ah, I don't want to be seen by mother, she'll punch me again..._

Because she was dedicated to go in one direction (away from Aoba), she ended up having to dodge behind the lockers further away on the opposite side. Shiori decided to follow Keima since he was the only one here that she knew and by this time, she was in a sea of confusion about his actions. In any case, Yui wasn't going to be seen in a hurry anyway as her mother fussed over Keima.

_Was that fear I saw in her... or rather 'my' eyes? _

Keima thought as he said: "For goodness sake, I'm absolutely fine."

Keima was surprised by the sudden change of tone that he heard in her voice from forceful to soft spoken. It grinded at him to no end afterwards and he hated how much it could be affecting the process of resetting the relationship between Yui and her mum.

"I only tripped slightly, I'm not hurt anywhere."

_Dammit, is this the spirit's doing? I even thought that I was starting to regain control as well, is this how all spirit hosts feel? But I never saw any signs of them struggling, maybe it's because of the body swap..._

"If you say so." Yui's mother replied although she was clearly still worried but she also seemed slightly shaken, whether it was because she was always overreacting or because of the way he started talking. He decided that didn't want to have his attention on her all the time, but then, neither did he want want talk with Aoba, he'd rather they spoke alone and besides, Shiori was also here and in this state, nothing was guaranteed.

As for Yui who was listening to this small exchange, the change in 'her' voice rung loud and clear.

_Not even Keima-sama... not even he would go against mother, what hope do I have?_

"I'll go and get my shoes," Keima said, "how about you go wait for me outside?"

Aoba gave a bored look and headed for home, it wasn't her business now that she'd found out what she wanted so far and she was aware of the situation.

"Are you sure you don't want me to accompany you?" Yui's mother asked attentively.

"No, seriously. I'll be alright." Keima reassured her.

Reluctantly, she followed after Aoba through the door and only three people were left in the room. Keima sighed and went to where her shoe locker was and she saw Yui and Shiori. He went to her locker and changed her shoes. Meanwhile, Yui was slightly perplexed as to whether she really did see a few solid black tendrils being emitted from her body.

"Katsuragi-san, how did you find the English test?" Keima asked.

"Eh? Oh that. I think I did quite well, the... advice you gave me really helped." Yui answered back although she was quite confused as to what he was trying to get at as well as convincing herself that the slight hue around her body didn't exist.

"Really? I guess we'll keep in touch in case you go backwards again." he said taking out his PFP and turning it on.

_Oh dear, I think I'd completely forgotten about that._

"Yeah, I guess we should." she replied.

"Do you have something that is important to you but is easily lost?" he asked.

"What's with the random question?" she asked.

"Just curious." he said although the aura he was exhibiting told her otherwise.

Shiori completely missed this; even her brain which could work so quickly could not follow these lines and responses which had been dropped from so many parties so randomly and she gave up, instead tuning everything out until it was all finished. It gave her time to think about her own things though.

_But did we really kiss on that day?_

"I have a little bear which I sometimes keep in my pocket; mother gave it to me." Yui answered.

"Do you mean this one?" Keima fished out a little bear from his left pocket, "Gosh, that's not little, that's tiny! Here', take it back."

"Ah, thank you. That's really kind of you." Yui said clutching the bear tightly for a while before she put it into her pocket, something about him taking out the bear didn't quite ring but she decided it would be better to think about it later.

"Well, I won't disturb you two so I'll get going." he walked out, making sure to turn off his PFP once Shiori was out of sight and unwillingly slotted it back into his pocket .

_Just a little longer and I'll be able to play it as much as I like for... a while._

As he walked up to Yui's mother, he frantically started patting around her school uniform for something, wearing a panicky face.

"What's the matter?" Yui's mother asked, still worried about the incident at the stairs... if it could be called an incident.

"I... I think I've lost something very important." he continued patting around (thank goodness Yui wasn't there to witness this act) and he rubbed his head, it was starting to hurt again.

"What is it? I'll help you find it."

"It's the little bear that you gave me when I was little. I think I last saw it in the shopping district before you pulled me out of the games shop."

"We'll go there after the dance lesson." Yui's mother replied.

_I. Don't. Want. To. Go. To. The. Dance. Lesson. _It was a thought that he strangely found seemed to be aimed more at himself than anyone else.

He started to tremble as he tried resisting against the urge to just obey her and it seemed to work to his advantage in some ways but less in others.

"Oh dear, you look terrible all of a sudden. I'll cancel the Japanese dance lesson and we'll go to the doctor immediately."

"No, I don't want to see a doctor... could I go and walk around by myself? I need some time." Keima pleaded.

"Yui, you know that you can't go around on your own. Don't you remember that you're a member of the Goido family and can't go wandering off without a bodyguard at least?"

Keima displayed a face of utter hopelessness and sadness. From his experience (from galges), puppy dog eyes wasn't going to work (even if she was the doting mother) and besides, he'd probably be good at 'hopelessness' anyway, it was what he'd been feeling for a while now.

"Oh Yui, please don't do this to me. You know how worried I'd get if you went off on your own." Yui's mother pleaded.

"Just this once, please." he begged, his half-formulated plan pretty much almost in pieces, this being the last straw.

Somehow, it had paid off.

"Just this once." she squeezed out reluctantly, torn between leaving her to such an (what she considered) unsafe place or seeing her in such a 'hopeless' state.

'Yui's' face brightened up a tad.

"Thank you." he said, relief apparent in his voice.

He turned to go and was suddenly reminded of something.

"Oh and make sure you don't make any of the bodyguards follow me."

Yui's mother sighed, realising that her last tactic had failed before it had even started.

"But wouldn't it make searching for your important thing harder." she feebly tried salvaging.

"Mother, what did I tell you?" Keima was starting to get annoyed and the polite act was slipping.

"Have a safe trip."

…

As Keima had gone outside, Yui noticed that the black hue had disappeared sometime during the exchange.

_It probably never existed..._

"Katsuragi-san, I wonder if... you know I'm writing a story... I mean..." she stopped, realising that she was never going to...

_The shield that shattered, revealing a whole new world, a world that was so much bigger than what she been living in. The realisation that came in such a warm and definite instant._

"Did we kiss?" she blurted out passionately, it was the onwe thing that she really wanted to know and she hadn't been able to stop herself from asking.

therefore, it took quite some time for her to register what she'd said and after that, no time at all for her face to heat up to a preposterous temperature and she froze.

_Why can so many land mines be triggered in such a short time? I didn't even ask to be in this suicide mission. Eh? When did I start thinking like this?  
><em>

"Wha-"

_A strange sensation of warmth. Books... falling around..._

She shook her head to clear it from this strange vision but this caused the person standing opposite her to misinterpret this completely. Shiori's body shook violently and she ran out, surging towards the direction of the library.

_Now I'll have to flee to the next planet or even the next galaxy. What was I thinking?_

"Wait!" Yui called after her but the word was left unheard by anyone.

…

Although that wasn't entirely true...

_How can she resist like this? I'm pretty strong and I'm struggling to keep a good hold on her, is she really a runaway spirit host? More importantly, she was even able to get away and do her own things. If she was able to do that, there's almost no way she could have a runaway spirit. Don't tell me that bitch of a district chief got it wrong. _

"Wait!" Elsie's buddy suddenly called out and Fiore decided to have a look out of curiosity.

She had been concentrating rather hard on 'Yui' after all and could never get a decent chunk of conversation and in any case, that boy bothered her. The library girl ran past her corner and towards the library, clutching a book tightly in her hands.

_Just what _is_ he doing? Rather than interact with the target, he going around upsetting other girls._

*Chuing*

_What? The sensor!_

She quickly whirled around and surveyed her surroundings while she unclipped the sensor. Although the sensor had already stopped ringing, this 'goddess' had to be close and as she looked towards the direction of the library, she saw it. The librarian had just run past that corner but a little girl which would definitely be too young to attend the school was stood there, generally hidden in the shadow of the building. Fiore started towards her but the girl suddenly turned in her direction and looked frightened, before running away. Fiore herself tried to catch her with her hagoromo but as she stretched it around the corner the girl was... it seemed that she'd gone. She smiled in a rather sinister way.

_Seems like I've struck gold. I guess that buddy of Elsie's will have to wait.  
><em>

* * *

><p>A.N: If you felt that the last bit with Keima and Yui's mum was a bit... not exactly amazing and somewhat too easy. I guess I gave up. I usually find the intelligent bits hard although I kinda hope that no-one suddenly thinks that... never mind. Hope you enjoyed this ridiculously late update. I didn't realise before the summer holidays that it'd be busier (+ the lie-ins and coming home late).<em><br>_


	34. Chapter 33: A bag of games

Keima smirked as he looked at the shelves of games in front of him.

_Yes, games. I finally have freedom!_

While he usually didn't shop for games so commonly, the number of games he was able to play was seriously limited in Yui's house. He was adamant in himself that some of the responsibility was down to that demon, if not all, for breaking so many games. He rifled through the galges section buying back the games which he'd lost in the mayhem from the night before. After stacking up quite a few (well, a lot of) games, he strolled up to the cashier to purchase the games. It seemed that it was the same one from last time who bothered him about buying the normal and the limited edition of the same game. It wasn't hard to recognise as he was as annoying as before.

"Umm, excuse me, but do you want these galges?" he asked dubiously at this new face.

"Yes." Keima replied bluntly.

"Umm, there are the normal and the limited edition of the game, do you want them both."

"Yes."

"Umm, are you sure-"

"Yes, yes, yes!" Keima almost shouted irritably at him, "I want them all."

"O-o-okay!" he replied back, more than slightly taken aback by 'her' ferocity and beeped the game through the scanner.

Keima took a quick glance at the game in question and his eye widened as he snatched the game to take a closer look at it.

"What is this otome game doing here?"

"You wanted it, didn't you?" the cashier asked back rather fearfully although it was something of a miracle that he said anything at all, let alone something that sounded rude.

"I don't want..."

Keima continued to stare at the game and wondered how on earth he hadn't noticed the blatant fact that there were boys on the cover. Nor did he quite understand why he had decided that he put it in with his bag of games.

Finally, the cashier had finished up and as he walked out he wondered whether there was enough in his only half-full bag of games. He looked through the shop window in passing and noticed a shelf which he'd never paid any attention to before.

_Are you serious?_

He looked again at his bag where he knew one of those forbidden games was in and went back inside.

...

It probably wasn't much of a surprise that he came back out with a much fuller bag. What had surprised him a great deal though was that it was fuller because of _otome games_, as well as stuff from other genres which actually, he did remember playing similar stuff when he was younger. In any case, the otome games at the top was such an eyesore, he fished a galge from somewhere at the bottom and replaced it as the game on top. Still, it did not quite make the feeling of doubt go away and the extra weight seemed to serve as a reminder that he had bought taboo games.

_Dammit, it's definitely not because of this girl's desires, it's purely research. _

It didn't quite convince him either and he ended up getting so deep into his conflicting thoughts that he didn't notice that he'd bumped into someone until he registered the pain in her butt.

"Owowow... Yui!"

"What? Mio!" Keima exclaimed as he quickly got up, neglecting to notice that he held nothing in her hand.

"What are you doing in this commoner shopping district?" Mio asked while picking up a piece of bread.

"What? Uhum...! What are you doing here with all that bread?" Keima stuttered as he noticed the state of his games.

_No excuse is gonna work if..._

He made a (frankly pathetic) attempt at blocking the games from Mio's sight although if he'd been thinking, there really wasn't much of a reason to and there were better ways of making her not notice even if the bread were scattered in a similar state.

"And you dropped a load of... what on earth is _this_?" Mio stuttered as she picked up an otome game.

"I can sort of explain..." he said.

"How can you be into this sort of commoner's stuff?" Mio asked.

"Well, you see-"

"And what's with _this_?" she glared at Keima while pointing to a galge, "Did that Otamega do something to you, you've totally changed. Right, I'm so going to make him pay!"

"Shh! Mio, we're in the streets now and everyone's looking at us. Couldn't we talk somewhere else?" Keima squeaked desperately; there were several factors in play that meant it wasn't quite a good idea to spark some commotion in the shopping district.

Mio complied and they picked up the bread and games before going into a bread shop. She didn't quite want Yui's status tarnished or anything and as far as she knew, this games business was Keima's fault... which it was in a different kind of way.

"By the way, what are you doing now?" Keima asked, hoping that the conversation would steer away from him.

"Oh, well, I have a part time job here now at this bread store..." Mio was interrupted as someone called for her.

For a while, Keima was just left to watch as Mio worked. He didn't quite expect this kind of change and it felt pretty surprising that it was him who'd put this change within her.

"You've been staring at me for quite a bit now, what's wrong?" Mio asked putting out more baguettes.

"You work unexpectedly hard but isn't it illegal for elementary school kids to work-" he was cut off by a clonk on the head.

As he looked at her, there was an expression of determination on her face.

"As the President's daughter I will rebuild his company but first things first, I've got to sort _you _out." Mio said while wielding a baguette like a sword pointed at Keima's direction.

If it wasn't for what she'd said, he might have laughed at her striking such an uncharacteristic and childish pose. Instead, it was everyone else in the shop who laughed as the manager came out to scold her for using the baguette as a toy. Keima took this opportunity to slip out and as he got to the end of the street, he heaved out a sigh. Well, his troubles weren't over yet but he didn't feel like facing them at the moment.

_I wonder if Mio's going to go find Yui tomorrow... oh well, Yui can deal with it when she comes._

He knew it wasn't trust and he didn't quite know when he started not to care. Nonetheless, he felt that the bag of games were a bigger concern. After all, half of them were taboo.

_I guess I should get back, I have no business here anymore anyway. Mio might become an asset though... I'll think about it when I get back, since I'm supposed to be trying to get away anyway._

…

Meanwhile, Yui was going home after the ordeal and was still deep in thought about the meaning of Aoba's words as she walked in through the door.

"I'm home!" she shouted out of instinct she never knew she'd possessed until this very moment.

Mari came to the door and after an uncertain yet happy look at the fact that 'he' wasn't playing games as her son usually would've doing almost 24/7 she announced a bit of unexpected news.

"Ah, Keima. Tenri-chan's come over to visit you. She's already been waiting awhile."

_Tenri? Who's that?_

"I'll come right away." Yui said and Mari left her to get dinner ready.

Upon going into the sitting room a girl that was sitting on the couch stood up and turned around in delight, revealing a box in her hands.

"Keima-kun! I've been waiting awhile." Tenri said with a light blush on her cheeks and opened up the box.

"I see. What did you come here for?" Yui asked, sitting down beside her seeing there wasn't really anything else she could do.

"Hey, Katsuragi-san. We need to talk." strangely, Tenri's lips hadn't moved and it felt like the voice was coming from the box.

"What?" Yui said before she could hold back.

"What do you mean what? I said we needed to talk." turns out it the reflection of Tenri in the box was actually the one talking.

_Oh yeah. Didn't Keima-sama say something about a next door neighbour who's really good at ventriloquism in that email he sent me?_

By this time, Tenri was looking at 'Keima' quizzically and the image couldn't help but sigh.

"You see, I suspect that there might be a goddess in Haibara-san but it seems that you're not actually too interested. I'm going to do something about it tomorrow just to see if there really is... why are you looking at me like that?"

"Your prowess at ventriloquism never ceases to amaze me." Yui said, with maybe a slightly late timing after snapping out of a little trance she'd got into, typically trying to work out how she did it like any other quizzical human.

Although Tenri had been blushing before, she couldn't help but stare at 'him' in confusion especially when she realised that maybe 'he' wasn't playing games because of the reason she'd hoped it was.

"What?" Diana uttered with a clearly annoyed face.


End file.
